Philadelphia Schools Layoff on Dec 31st

It used to be that no company or organization would want to layoff people this close to the holiday season. That period of time, right before Christmas and up until the New Year, was a dead zone for letting people go. Either you did it before hand, or you let it go until next quarter. Those days are gone and now a new era of layoffs have come, the era of anything goes and no one is safe from the end of the year budget cut layoffs.

This time this the bad news is coming from the Philadelphia School District. They have recently confirmed that they are going to send out layoff notices today to 141 members of the school union, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. These job cuts are part of a planned cut in school services that are designed to make up a very large budget shortfall in the city’s budget

These cuts, which are being made at the end of a fiscal year, and in the middle of the school year, are designed to help the city shore up a budget hole of $39 million. Though the layoffs will help to shore up the budget it will not give them everything that they need. The city schools will still have to find a way to fill up almost half of the original gap, roughly $20 million, in order to break even.

While no classroom teachers will be let go in this layoff action the following staffer will be cut: 28 secretaries, 47 school nurses, 20 supportive services assistants, 18 non-teaching assistants, 13 school operations officers, 5 library assistants. The rest of the jobs will be from support staff and the district office.

The union president, Jerry Jordan, said that the timing of the cuts was adding insult to injury and told a reporter for The Notebook that they were going to, “challenge these layoffs using every legal means available.” He also went on to add that, “The District cannot cut its way to better student achievement. It’s time to say, ‘Enough.”

Some of you may remember the earlier coverage about this matter from October, which explains how it is that the changes to staffing were decided upon, “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.”

So a lot of the decisions about who is going to get cut were done at the school level. Since the rules of seniority still apply to the employees this means that some of the employees may have been moved from location to location in order to meet the needs of the district.