DeKalb County Schools to Cut Jobs

While jobs in education are becoming harder and harder to keep as more and more schools choose to cut back on workers in order to make ends meet with their shrinking budgets and rising costs. Today we are going to talk about the cuts to the DeKalb County School District. The DeKalb County Schools are getting ready to cut the jobs of about 400 of their workers in the name of the budget.

The school is using the information from last years 2020 Vision plan to help guide the layoffs. For those of you who have schools that do not have such a plan here is a look at how the school describes it, “2020 Vision is an eleven-month process that will culminate in a that will describe the facilities, programs, and other needs of the school system through 2020 and the recommended facility improvements required to meet those needs. The 2011–2012 plan, which will be developed and approved over five months, is a component of the 2020 vision.”

The loss of these 412 jobs is coming primarily from the support staff of the school. Some of the positions that are going to be cut include media clerks, bus drivers and interpreters. The loss of these 400 jobs will be more than enough to qualify as a mass layoff action under the current federal guidelines. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea here is a look at how the federal government defines a mass layoff, “actions that result in workers being separated from their jobs. Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.”

Of course, this is not the only school to experience the pinch of a smaller budget. For those of you who missed out on our earlier coverage of cuts to schools in Reading, PA, here is an excerpt that will get you up to speed in no time at all. “Today the job cuts in question are to the schools in the town of Reading, Pennsylvania. The school board for the town voted to cut back on about 200 workers in order to close a serious hole in the budget. About 108 of those workers who are in classroom educators are being dropped by the schools in order to make up the $40 million the school does not have in the budget. This plan will also require the closure of several schools in the district and require the school to dip into reserve funds in order to make things work. All in all it looks pretty grim for the schools.” Cuts like these seem to be going on everywhere.

For the time being the final vote in the fate of the school, and the budget will happen in the second week of July. At that time the decision will become final and the layoff notices will be sent out.