Kenosha Schools Cut Jobs

Cuts to education budgets, and the associated staffing, seem to be reaching all of the corners of the nation as cities, large and small alike, jockey to find ways to make ends meet on less funding each year. This time the school with budget problems, and job cuts, is the Kenosha School District the district has recently made an announcement that it expects to cut back on about 250 teachers for the coming school year.

The cut of 250, primarily from members of the teaching staff is designed to help the school to close up a shortfall in the budget of about $28 million that is being projected for the coming school year. On the bright side 21 of the cuts will be lost due to attrition when teachers retire.

Of course the budget will not be finalized until the 1^st of May so the specifics of the plan could change before them. If things change drastically we will keep you up to date. Though the only changes will be for the worst, as the school district will still have to get creative in the next couple of weeks. The current number of layoffs will still leave $3 million in shortfall to be made up, and for the time being the schools do not seem to know where it is coming from.

These changes are nothing compared to what is happening to schools in California. . For those of you who missed out on our earlier coverage of the situation in California 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.”