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Union prez Cicarella: This hurts.
Seventeen school counselors, nine classroom teachers, six library media specialists, and four physical education teachers will receive layoff notices, in the latest round of budget-cutting to hit Elm City schools.
Superintendent Carol Birks mailed those layoff notices to 36 full-time certified employees on Wednesday. Those proposed reductions, which take effect when summer break ends, must still be approved by the Board of Education.
“We’re saddened by the fact that the state as well as the city are facing dire fiscal straits that affect us,” Birks said. “I tried to be sensitive to the fact this is not easy. We have great people in our district and we want to preserve the talent to help ensure that our students are successful. But I have to try to do everything I can possible to close the structural deficit and we also have to have some Central Office roles.”
The district faces a $19 million budget deficit this year, brought on by the expiration of a major federal grant and the state and city’s flat-funding. Birks said she plans to make up about one-third of the cost through personnel.
That meant the cuts could have been much deeper. The teachers union estimates they were able to save close to 100 jobs through attrition, as teachers who’d lost their jobs at shuttered high schools, who’d opted-out of returning to turnaround schools or who’d been taken off administrative assignments filled up this year’s vacancies.
There’s also a chance that some of the educators could get their jobs back before school starts, if anyone that shares their credentials decides to retire or resign in the next month.
Dave Cicarella, the union president, said that four teachers had already been spared from layoffs just this week, as employees make last-minute decisions about whether they’ll teach in New Haven next year. He said he’s “confident” that some of the layoffs won’t go through, but he added that preventing “all of them, admittedly, would be a stretch.”
By the union rules, those who aren’t called back will have first dibs on any openings within the next two years.
ESUMS students ask for more guidance counselors at a Dec. 2017 meeting.
In deciding whom to lay off, Birks said she tried to keep most of the cuts away from the classroom. “You can’t not have a fourth-grade teacher,” she said. “We have to have people who teach.”
The bulk of the layoffs will fall on counselors, despite repeated complaints from higher-schoolers that a rotating, overextended staff already struggled to connect with students amid long wait times for appointments.
Previous superintendents went out of their way to place a counselor in each building, but Birks said that created unequal staffing ratios.
Under her new model, Birks said, each counselor will be responsible for 250 students, the level recommended by the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the American School Counselor Association. Kindergarten through fourth grade will no longer count in the total.
Birks said that staffing ratio sets the minimum for each building. On top of that, principals can choose to spend more of their site-based budget on extra counselors, as she expects most of the high schools will.
“There’s been lots of conversation throughout the district about equity and several schools having more resources than others,” Birks said. “We want to start with a baseline for everyone. Then we will provide schools with the resources based on the concentration of need,” like a high number of English-language learners or special education students.
Cicarella said that the union had no input on the new staffing model. He told Birks he didn’t think it was a good idea to cut counselors, creating a situation where some students might be told to come back the next day to deal with their problems. In reply, Birks asked what else she could cut without touching the classroom. Cicarella said he didn’t have an answer.
Superintendent Carol Birks: Keep cuts from the classroom.
Birks also recommended slimming down the number of library media specialists, splitting them between schools.
She also plans to end Project Pride, an adventure program that takes students hiking at Sleeping Giant State Park and overnight camping at Camp Cedarcrest. That will eliminate roles for four physical education teachers.
In many cases, the employees whose roles as counselors, librarians and coaches were cut fell back on their other teaching certifications. According to the union contract, that meant they bumped more junior teachers.
After all the reshuffling, there were still nine classroom teachers left over who didn’t have a certification to match any of the open slots: four in English language arts, four in social-studies and one in business.
On Wednesday, just as part-time employees started to receive the letter rescinding their layoffs, full-time employees were hearing that they might be on the chopping block. After a 30-year career in the district without ever seeing teachers laid off, Cicarella sent out a memo to his membership explaining what was going on.
“I cannot adequately convey my frustration and sadness. Losing one of our colleagues to a lay-off is one too many,” he wrote. “All of these decisions were about money, not performance. … Perhaps that is what makes this so frustrating.”
Some employees felt that the district hadn’t fought hard enough to keep their jobs. One teacher who’s being laid off asked why other cost-saving measures, like furlough days, had seemingly been taken off the table.
“I have to question whether every option has really been explored. Why haven’t they openly discussed the option for furlough days?” said the employee, who asked to remain anonymous. “It seems like common sense to shorten the school year by two days, rather than deprive thousands of elementary school children of library access for the whole year.”
The teacher said that furloughs could happen on professional development days, when students don’t come to school or go home early anyway to limit the impact on academics.
The employee added that a similar strategy had saved as many as 43 jobs in Stratford, after teachers agreed to cut two days from the academic year, saving roughly $700,000, as part of a broader package of cuts that included de-magnetizing a school open to suburbanites to save on transportation costs.
“District and union leadership are going to need to be more creative about how to address the deficit,” the employee said. “They keep saying that they want to keep cuts as far away from students as possible, but every substantive cut so far has directly hurt students.”
Birks has taken heat for wanting to fill positions in Central Office at the same time that she’s sending out pink slips. But she’s argued that she can’t run the district alone, saying she needs a chief financial officer to watch the budget, a talent chief to handle personnel, and a deputy superintendent to align the district’s academics.
Even though his union is taking some of those painful cuts, Cicarella said that the Central Office positions needed to be filled. Without anyone else on Meadow Street yet, “everything goes to her,” Cicarella said. “That’s creating part of the log-jam,” a delay that other administrators and building leaders have also noticed.