D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee fired back Wednesday against the “completely unsubstantiated” rumors concerning the recent firings of nearly 400 school employees.
To the charge of targeting veteran teachers for firings, Rhee said, “such a practice is not only illegal but morally reprehensible.”
The percentage of fired school staff over 40 years old “mirrors almost exactly the percentage of veterans within the DCPS work force,” she said.
Employees with three or fewer years of experience “are more heavily represented” among those fired than among total staff.
Rhee also attempted to explain why more than 900 teachers were hired over the summer if hundreds were going to be fired in the fall.
“To ensure that we hire the best possible candidates, we allow principals to hire teachers in the spring,” according to an agreement with the teachers union, she said.
The chancellor’s responses were part of a posting to the DCPS Web site that answered some — though not all — of the questions surrounding Friday’s layoffs.
Still not clear is the reason for a budget shortfall more than double the figure cited by the D.C. Council. On July 31, Mayor Adrian Fenty signed a fiscal 2010 budget that cut $20.5 million from the schools. But in justifying the layoffs, Rhee blamed a shortfall of nearly $44 million.
The question has been a $20 million gap Rhee attributed to “additional school-level resources” that the schools could not pay for.
Rhee told The Examiner that if a teacher lost his job because his school closed, he would go through a process to find a position at a new school. In the past, if he did not land a new job, DCPS kept him on payroll and placed him as, say, a long-term substitute.
“We couldn’t do that this year,” Rhee said, essentially prioritizing programming over holding on to employees deemed unnecessary due to enrollment numbers.
Jeff Smith, executive director for advocacy group D.C. Voice, said the responses shed much-needed light on the issues, but added that “it’s unfortunate that this level of transparency was spurred by the protests and incessant demands stemming from the confusion about what’s going on.”
