Philly Schools May Lose More Jobs

The schools in the city of Philadelphia are staring down the barrel of some serious cuts to their budget and those cuts could result in the loss of badly needed jobs. According to an announcement made by Michael Masch, the school district of Philadelphia’s Chief Financial Officer, almost $17 million in new cuts will need to be made to the school budget this year, and after that there may be up to $22 more million that needs to be cut in order for the Philadelphia schools to remain fiscally solvent.

This amounts to a loss of about 1% for each school in the district, or about $40,000 per campus. As you can imagine this means that schools may have to make some hard choices in the future.

These budgetary changes are the result of a plan, announced over the summer that is designed to close a large budget shortfall that the school district has to cope with. How big of a shortfall? Well most of the estimates were coming in a close to half of a billion dollars. This short fall comes from, among other things, a sizeable decrease in the amount of funding that the city of Philadelphia is getting from the state of Pennsylvania and the federal government.

In order to achieve this the school district is letting go of 3,800 workers, about 1,300 of who are being laid off. These cuts mean that less goes all of the instructional programs that the school system offers. Yet, more program cuts are on the horizon. Some of the cuts expected are as follows:

– $1.3 million in English Language Learning (ELL) programs.
– $600,000 for school psychologists on campus.
– $300,000 for instrumental music instruction.
– $100,000 from the athletics department
– $100,000 will come from educational technology.
– $100,000 for bilingual counseling assistants.

While these numbers are impressive, they are nowhere near enough to make up the whole of the massive deficit that the city school board is facing. An updated plan, which takes into account these changes and the $75 million that the school was able to save thanks to judicious refinancing of bond payments and loans, is expected to be submitted to the SRC by the end of the next two weeks. So, the rest of the changes will at least be known before the holiday season kicks in and the proposal gets caught in a regulatory quagmire of delays.

Mr. Masch told a reporter for WHYY, a local radio station, that the rest of the needed shortfall money will most likely have to come from the school budgets themselves, since most of the rest of the schools operating costs are locked in be either laws or agreements with workers. This means that the schools will most likely have to make cuts to the staff of the schools. While regular teachers have been protected from the layoffs in the current year the instructional programs are not guaranteed to be spared in the wake of the budget cuts to come.