Massive layoff of teachers in U.S. feared

School districts across the country, forced to resort to drastic money-saving measures, are warning hundreds of thousands of teachers that their jobs may be eliminated in June.

The districts have no choice, they say, because their usual sources of revenue — state money and local property taxes — have been hit hard by the recession. In addition, federal stimulus money earmarked for education mostly has been used up this year.

As a result, the 2010-11 school term is shaping up as one of the most austere in the last half-century. In addition to teacher layoffs, districts plan to close schools, cut programs, enlarge classes and shorten the school day, week or year to save money.

"We are doing things and considering options I never thought I'd have to consider," said Peter Gorman, superintendent of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, which expect to cut 600 of the North Carolina district's 9,400 teachers this year, after laying off 120 last year. "This may be our new economic reality."

Teacher pink slips

California districts have given pink slips to 22,000 teachers. Illinois authorities predict 17,000 job cuts in public schools. And New York has warned nearly 15,000 teachers that their jobs could disappear in June.

Not all school systems are in trouble. State mineral revenues, for instance, largely have spared Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming from serious belt-tightening.

But they are the exceptions.

In Washington state, districts must decide by May 15 how many teachers will receive pink slips. The state budget, passed last week, included fewer cuts than districts feared, but it reduced state K-12 spending by $120 million. Seattle Public Schools already has laid off about 85 people in its central office for the upcoming school year.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan estimated that state budget cuts imperiled 100,000 to 300,000 public-school jobs nationwide. He said Monday that the nation was flirting with "education catastrophe" and urged Congress to approve additional stimulus funds to save school jobs.

"We absolutely see this as an emergency," said Duncan, who noted that President Obama's campaign to shake up perennially low-achieving schools and promote effective teaching could be undermined if class sizes rise, summer school is cut and other education programs are jettisoned.

Everywhere, school officials tend to overestimate the potential for layoffs at this time of year, to ensure that every employee they might have to dismiss receives required notifications.

Estimates may change

Whether the estimates rise or fall will depend in part on labor negotiations under way in hundreds of districts, and on how taxpayers vote on school-levy proposals in many states and towns. But those adjustments will affect the likely layoff numbers only at the margins.

Some of the deepest cuts are in Los Angeles, where Superintendent Ramon Cortines sent notices to 5,200 of the district's 80,000 employees last month, telling them that they were losing their jobs.

"I've been superintendent in five major school districts, and had responsibility for cuts for years — but not this magnitude, not this devastating," Cortines said.

And there is no end in sight, he said. He cut his district's $12 billion budget this school year by $1 billion, has prepared $600 million in cuts for the term beginning in the fall and expects a deficit for the following year of $263 million.

"I don't see this being over in the year 2014-15," Cortines added.

In the economic-stimulus bill passed in February 2009, Congress appropriated about $100 billion in emergency-education financing. States spent much of that in the current fiscal year, saving more than 342,000 school jobs, about 5.5 percent of all positions in the nation's 15,000 school systems, according to a study by the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.

States will spend about $36 billion of the stimulus money in the next fiscal year, leaving their budgets short by some $144 billion, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning research group.

About one-quarter of all state spending goes to public schools, said Jon Shure, a state fiscal expert at the center, so without new aid, the continuing job losses will add to the nation's employment woes.

Educational emergency

Warning of an educational emergency, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, last week proposed a $23 billion school bailout bill that essentially would provide more education stimulus financing to stave off the looming wave of school layoffs.

"This is not something we can fix in August," said Harkin, chairman of the Senate education committee. "We have to fix it now."

Michael Petrilli, who served in the Education Department under President George W. Bush, predicted the bill could attract significant support. Still, Petrilli said, an underlying problem would remain unresolved.

"Is the federal government going to try to prop up states and districts forever?" he said. "If not, we're just kicking the can down the road. Eventually, districts need to learn to live with less."

Because Harkin's bill would add to the deficit, senior Democratic aides said, it was unlikely to pass.

Indeed, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said he worried about where the government would find $23 billion for a bailout in a time of growing federal budget deficits. "I wonder from whose schoolchildren we are going to borrow this money, because we have a looming debt crisis in this country and we'll need to debate this," he said. "We all want to help our children and our schools, but that is a deep concern."

A survey by the American Association of School Administrators found that nine of every 10 superintendents expected to lay off school workers for the fall, up from two of every three superintendents last year. The survey also found that the percentage considering a four-day week had jumped to 13 percent, from 2 percent a year ago.

One of those districts is Atwater-Cosmos-Grove City in Minnesota, which has asked the state to let it shorten the school week. The district's business manager, Dan Tait, called the measure "another tool in the toolbox" for reducing costs.

"We're a district that's spread across 340 square miles, so we spend an inordinate amount of money on transportation for our 812 students," Tait said.

The current round of cuts is particularly wrenching, superintendents said, because their financing already was cut to the bone last year. For example, Barbara Thompson, superintendent of the Montgomery public schools in Alabama, said the state used to give her district $975 per student for supplies, technology and library costs.

"They cut it to zero," Thompson said. "So they can't cut it any more."

Seattle Times education reporter Linda Shaw and The Washington Post contributed to this report.