A dire budget for Montgomery County Public Schools will force the largest layoffs for staff members since the early 1990s.
The bulk of the staff cuts — about two dozen individuals who will receive notices next week — will be teachers in subject areas with declining enrollments, such as business education and family consumer science, said teachers union President Doug Prout
“We’d rather have no one cut, but I’m hopeful that a good number of them will be rehired as retirements and resignations happen,” Prouty said.
Any of the county’s tenured teachers who plan to retire or resign this year have until July 15 to notify the system.
Last year, five people were laid off in the spring, and all five were rehired over the summer.
Neighboring Fairfax County was able to avoid mass teacher layoffs this year, in part because the school board did not raise the average class size for the first time in two years, said spokesman Paul Regnier.
Montgomery raised its average class size by one student at every grade level, saving about $16 million and reducing staff by 252 positions.
Most of those staff reductions were taken care of by moving cut teachers into open positions elsewhere.
The district also cut 51 central office positions, for a savings of nearly $6.5 million.
All but a handful of those cuts will result in actual employees out of a job.
The school system saw an overall decrease of nearly $97 million from its $2.2 billion fiscal 2010 budget, even as it expects an increase in enrollment next fall.
In the budget’s final adoption, expected on Tuesday, more than $9 million was cut from textbooks and instructional materials, and nearly $2 million from a multiyear effort to reform middle schools in part by offering more specialized programs, like arts or aerospace.
“These reductions … will, no doubt, have a significant impact on all of our schools,” Superintendent Jerry Weast wrote in a letter to teachers on Thursday.
School board President Pat O’Neill said the cuts “could’ve been much worse” had the state not granted the county a waiver last week, forgiving it its legal responsibility to fund schools at consistent levels. “But next year we know we’ll have problems still,” O’Neill said. “We’re not out of the valley yet — we’re not climbing back up the mountain yet.”
