Milwaukee Public School District to Cut 400 Jobs

More job cuts are coming to the field of public education. This time the cuts to staffing are coming to the workers of the Milwaukee Public School District. They plan to cut back on 400 jobs for the next year. They are also planning to close down eight of the schools that are currently in operation in the district.

While the Milwaukee Public School District was quick to point out that not all of these cuts will be made by putting people currently in positions out of a job. Some of the job cuts will be done by attrition. For those of you not familiar with attrition it is when an open position, or a position left by a retiring employee, is simply never refilled. The school district was not so forthcoming with exactly how many of the 400 positions were going to be cut that way.

The schools that are expected to close at the end of the school year include the following buildings: Montessori International Baccalaureate, The School for Urban Planning and Architecture, The Transition Intervention Experience Center, The Where Opportunities Require Knowledge Institute, The Wisconsin Career Academy, 68th Street School, 65th Street School and Burroughs Middle School. While a good number of the schools that are set to close were home to very focused programs in the district the loss will surely be felt by the students, who will now have to be shipped to other schools for the coming school year.

The cuts will include 160 positions that are already slated to close, 126 from the school districts Central Services department, and 114 from schools that are going to stay in service for the coming school year. Of those 114 cut 87 of them are expected to be from members of the teach staff, the rest will be made to members of the support or administrative staff.

The layoff notices will not go out until after the final vote on the budget, which is scheduled for the end of May. Of course that means that with some careful negotiation some of the jobs could be saved. This would not be the first time that layoffs in Milwaukee would be averted by employee action. Though hopefully this time it will not have to go to the courts. For those of you who missed out on the overturned layoffs in the city here is an excerpt from our earlier coverage that will get you up to speed:

“Well, it looks like that court action has saved some jobs for the workers who were going to be out of a job.  The layoff of three of the captains, who were put out of a job under the watch of Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr., was overturned on Thursday by the county Civil Service Commission, who decided that the layoffs were, in fact, a violation of the county rules.

Sheriff  Clarke made the argument that the three officers were let go because their jobs have been cut from the 2012 budget for the department. The commission sided with the three officers, Kerri McKenzie, Darlene Goodlette and Michael Rewolinski, that there was no reason given for the cuts that was in compliance with the county rules. According to the rules for non-union workers in  Milwaukee County cutting jobs must be justified by issues with their job performance, a lack of the correct skills, problems with the employees attendance or budget matters. The positions being eliminated were simply not enough of a reason to put them out of their jobs.

At this moment it is the belief the Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. created his own artificial budget crisis by promoting several of his deputies to captain, which called for a pay raise for each of them, leaving less money for the workers who remained at the deputy level, and creating the need for layoffs.”