St. Landry Parish School System Cuts 182 Jobs

It seems like no place is safe from the education layoffs. As money from above becomes tight and income both from sales taxes and property taxes simultaneously has to stretch further while it is shrinking may cities and states are having to make significant cuts to all areas of their budgets in order to make ends meet. In most cases public schools are no exception to the budget-cutting rule and schools across the nation are shedding staff at a truly prodigious rate.

This time it is the schools of the St. Landry Parish School System that are going to take the hit and lose staff. In the St. Landry Parish School System about 182 job cuts are expected to happen in the next couple of weeks. The job cuts are expected to impact workers in a significant number of areas. Teachers, librarians, maintenance workers and school secretaries are just some of the positions that are expected to get the chopping block in the next couple of days and weeks.

The first round of cuts, which will impact 71 of the workers will have to be made by the last day of April. The rest of the cuts are not that far behind, those workers will be out a job by the 22^nd of May. Considering that the schools only employ about 2,000 people these cuts fall just shy of pruning back about one-tenth of the overall staffing.

The cuts are all part of a plan to save about $3 million from the school budget, which must be done to make up the gap between current expenses and next year’s budget. The schools are also looking into shunting a larger portion of the employee’s health insurance costs to the workers in order to further reduce staffing costs without further job cuts.

In the current economy many schools are forced to make cuts. For those of you who missed out on some of our earlier coverage here is an excerpt that will get you up to speed on cuts in another area in no time at all:

“When it comes to job cuts to education there has been no shortfall of districts looking to cut back on their staff as a way to make ends meet. Today the cuts are coming from the Battle Creek Public Schools as they are getting ready to get rid of some of their educators in order to fill in a sizable budget gap.  The city of Battle Creek Schools have made $2.5 million in cuts to their budget in order to make ends meet. In order to make those cuts the schools are going to cut back on 26 in classroom teachers, as well as a number of other jobs. The cuts to classroom teachers include 3 elementary school teachers, 10 middle school teachers and 3 high school teachers. There will also be cuts to the administrative system and assistants.

Of course these cuts will not be enough to make up for the $5 million in cuts that will need to be made in order to set the budget to right. Another $686,000 will come from having the schools cuts its Bearcat Alternative Program, an alternative education program for students who have not done well in the traditional education system. As this program only has about 170 students in the program this loss would not impact a large number of students. For now the rest of the cuts are yet to be decided upon, and the school will have some hard choices to make if it wants to get up to speed on the budget for the coming school year.”