D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has fired 18 employees from the public school system’s long-troubled special education department, according to a statement from her office.
“These decisions were not made lightly,” said Jennifer Calloway, spokeswoman for Rhee.
Calloway attributed the firings to cost control measures and to efforts to improve operations based on the department’s “overarching goals and initiatives.”
The layoffs are hardly the first cuts from what many critics viewed as a bloated central office upon Rhee’s arrival in 2007. On a Friday in early March 2008, Rhee fired more than 100 central office employees, citing a “significant need to streamline.”
Rumor of last week’s firings first came over the weekend from Candi Peterson, a Rhee critic and school social worker who runs the Washington Teacher blog.
Peterson posted e-mails from two anonymous DCPS employees who said that central office administrators blamed the firings on a looming budget deficit, threatening more job losses to come.
But in a sign of the ongoing mistrust between Rhee’s administration and many DCPS employees, the posted e-mails alleged ulterior motives.
“This was a blatant office-wide termination of folks that didn’t get along with their direct supervisors,” one e-mail said. The writer also said that most of the fired employees were black and “outspoken.”
Similar allegations were made last fall when Rhee fired nearly 400 teachers and school staff as a result of long-term enrollment declines and budget pressures.
At that time, the school system could not determine how many of the fired teachers were black because they had never been required to identify their race for central office records. Rhee’s team did, however, show that firings were not limited to those teachers who had served longest in the classroom.
Friday’s firings came about one week before Rhee goes before the D.C. Council for an oversight hearing.
Mayor Adrian Fenty’s 2011 budget is expected to be introduced on April 1, with all agencies, including the schools, preparing for significant reductions.
