Superintendent proposes cutting 35 jobs

Nearly 16 teaching positions would be eliminated

Posted: Wednesday, February 24, 2010 12:00 am
By Jacob Owens
Special to the Whig |
Most of the spending increases included in the proposed $108.4 million education services portion of county superintendent Henry Schaffer’s budget proposal would be to cover cost-of-living increases negotiated in the school board’s labor agreements with the five unions that represent county school employees.
Shaffer, meanwhile, has proposed that discretionary spending in the educational services portion of the county schools budget be cut by $717,483, a nearly 10-percent reduction from the budget approved for the current school year.
Those spending cuts would include the elimination of 34.48 positions — including more than 16 teaching jobs — by the end of the 2010-2011 school year.
“These reductions will result in a real savings of more than $1.6 million,” said Tom Kappra, the county schools’ chief financial officer. “We paid people to do these jobs last year and next year we won’t pay anyone to do them.”
If approved by the county school board, the 35 job cuts next year would follow the elimination of 28 positions this school year and 20 positions during the 2008-2009 school year, according to administrators.
Shaffer said he hopes to avoid layoffs next year by eliminating positions through attrition; meaning new employees would not be hired to fill certain vacancies or positions left open by retiring employees.
“The bottom line is that the collateral of all our budgeting work could be someone’s job and that is an important thing that we keep in mind,” Shaffer said Monday. “We want long-term fixes and to do that we will need major changes that will have an effect on some of our employees that won’t be easy to swallow, but it is the correct thing to do.”
Kappra said school officials would assess every job vacancy to determine whether those positions are vital.
“Just because a job is vacated does not mean that we’ve eliminated it,” he said. “In fact, we are actively recruiting to fill five vacant positions right now.”
In some situations, job positions would be downgraded, such as the loss of an assistant principal at Perryville Middle School. That position would become a local support teacher due to declining enrollment at the school, administrators said.
“We didn’t decide on these reductions last month,” D’Ette Devine, the associate superintendent of administration said. “They are something we have known about since last September and we targeted these eliminations throughout the school year.”
Shaffer said he would prefer not to propose any budget cuts because they hamper the schools’ ability to provide a quality education in Cecil County.
He said he is most concerned with the county’s ability to recruit and retain quality teachers during lean budget years.
“Teachers are now more mercenary than ever with where they are choosing to teach,” he said. “Cecil County lags behind the state average in teachers’ salaries and teachers can earn thousands more in neighboring counties and states without moving.”
Carolyn Teigland, the county schools associate superintendent of education services, said the county’s teacher-to-student ratio also becomes a concern when the school board is forced to cut teaching positions.
“Class size is always a concern for us, but especially now when we are seeing a new population of economically disadvantaged students, like those on free-and-reduced lunches, who have special needs that our teachers may not be able to handle,” she said. “It will be hard to prepare them for those students’ needs when we are lacking professional development.”
Teigland said she believes Shaffer’s budget proposal would make the spending cuts are that required while having the least direct impact on classrooms.
“But I believe we are at a time where we can least afford to tread water,” she added.
After hearings are held on each aspect of Shaffer’s budget proposal, the county school board will vote to adopt the spending plan or an amended version of their own. That final version will then be forwarded on to the county commissioners for final approval before July 1.