Peoria School Cut 200+ Workers

Working in the field of public education was, for many years, a stable profession. One in which after the first three years you were pretty much guaranteed to have a job for the rest of your life. In the recent economy that has made that dream of stability in the name of public service a thing of the past. As many schools look to make cuts there are many teachers who are looking to find out if they are going to be out of a job during the next school year.

Well it looks like the newest district to solve its fiscal issues by cutting teachers is the Peoria School District. The members of the board of the Peoria School District have decided to cut back on about 258 workers. Of those 258 workers about 53 are going to be in  classroom educators. They are also going to cut back on 16 of their probationary teachers for reasons that are being dubbed as “poor performance”.

That  having been said, we have an interesting amount of data about the types of jobs that are going to be cut from the rosters. Here is a look at the jobs that are expected to be cut, though right now exactly which ones are going to be gone:

– Full time teachers: 53

– Part-time teachers: 100
– Probationary teachers: 16
– Attrition cuts by not renewing the contracts of support employees: 105

Of course when you compare these cuts to the ones being made in other areas of the country these seem very small. Take, for example, the massive education cuts being made in the schools all over the state of California. For those of you who missed out on our earlier coverage here is an excerpt that will get you up to speed in no time at all:

“It looks like things are getting much, much worse for the schoolteachers in the state of California. We have been talking a lot, in the last couple of weeks and months about the kinds of cuts that are being made to the schools in the state. In a lot of cases those cuts are being made in generic terms we know how many workers are going to be let go, but we do not know how many of them will be classroom teachers. Today we had some light shed on those numbers.

According to information released by the California Teachers Association an estimated 19,500 classroom teachers were given layoff notices over the past couple of weeks. The layoff notices had to be given by the 15^th of March in order to be legal under the laws of the state of California. So if an educator did not get a layoff notice by that date then they are free and clear, at least until next years deadline.

The cuts, which are coming because of the need to cut 20 Billion in funding from the state education budget. Unless the schools get a tax increase from voters in the near future, which is on the ballet, the schools will have to make these cuts, which average out to about $370 per student in the state. The only good news for schools is that the number of enrolled students at California schools is, depending on where you live, either staying stable or shrinking.”