D.C. schools will be forced to lay off teachers and other staff under significantly slashed budgets that officials plan to release later this week, according to members of central office staff.
“These are going to be very severe cuts — we’re talking about positions, bodies,” said one D.C. Public Schools official who works closely with Interim Chancellor Kaya Henderson. “In the past we’ve tried to focus on central office, but this is school level as well.”
The District had planned to release the budgets to individual schools Tuesday and make them public Wednesday, but late Monday night the timetable was set back because of complications, the official said. School employees are “bracing” for cuts “from teachers all the way up to administration,” according to the official.
DCPS spokesman Fred Lewis confirmed that the District plans to release the budgets soon. Lewis declined to comment on the budgets’ contents.
Henderson has warned that D.C.’s budget crisis will mean leaner budgets that could drive up class sizes. In an e-mail Monday, Henderson said, “I don’t have any comments on the budget at this point.”
Last year, DCPS proposed $17.7 million cuts to central office positions and nonpersonal services to stave off classroom reductions.
The city — facing a $545 million deficit in fiscal 2012 — spends about $750 million on its 123 public schools, plus an additional $400 million for 52 public charter schools.
Upon receiving the school system’s proposed budgets, principals meet with their local school advisory teams and send back the budgets, which then flow to the D.C. Council and are approved by Mayor Vincent Gray.
“It’s a difficult effort because again, whatever front you turn to, we’ve got fiscal constraints that we’re operating under. … It’s a very painstaking and in some instances painful process,” Gray said recently of the school budgets, which are overdue by about a month.
At a budget hearing earlier this winter, parents testified that schools were already understaffed.
“It is unrealistic to expect our students, especially the most challenged ones, to reach higher levels of achievement when classes are so large that the curriculum has to be cut back,” said Sarah Whitener, chairwoman of Woodrow Wilson Senior High School’s advisory team.
