Shelby County Schools is now cutting 42 teaching positions, not the initial 220 that it estimated earlier this week, administrators said in a board meeting Thursday. Those teachers will be able to apply for 37 new teaching positions the district created using funds from a federal grant.
The cuts are in response to enrollment numbers that are well below the 117,000 students the district had estimated would come to school, according to Dorsey Hopson II, the district’s superintendent. At this point, Shelby County has closer to 113,000 students and some 7,000 teachers, district officials said. An additional 10,000 Memphis students are attending charter schools, and 6,500 attend schools in the state-run Achievement School District. Schools receive state funding based on enrollment figures that are taken after the 20th day of the school year.
At the same time, the district is creating 37 new teaching positions, most of them in reading or literacy, funded with leftover money from a federal Race to the Top grant. Although the grant period ended July 1, the district received a waiver from the state to continue approved work with the remaining funds. Shelby County has $5 million left earmarked specifically for turning around low-performing schools and promoting effective teachers and leaders, among a few other categories.
The district will hold a hiring fair for all open positions for excessed staff on Monday.
At a meeting of the district’s board’s Budget and Finance committee meeting Thursday, Hopson said that while approximately 1,500 of the students were estimated to have gone to the new school districts in the Memphis suburbs, 2,500 students expected to enroll the district simply have not appeared this year. “We think some may have gone to DeSoto (Miss.),” Hopson said. “We think a significant portion are just not in school.”
The district also plans to cut six assistant principal positions, six counselor positions, and 17 clerical positions.
Hopson said the cuts would be concentrated in schools that had serious mismatches in staff and enrollment. At Vollentine Elementary, which was supposed to take in students from nearby Klondike Elementary, now an ASD-run charter school, he said that three second grade teachers had classes of 11 students each. The school will cut one of those teachers.
He said that other cuts would be determined partly based on teachers’ scores on their evaluations.
“We really dug deep to make sure these cuts aren’t going to have an adverse affect on schools,” said Hopson.
Some schools were able to stave off cuts. Sharpe Elementary principal Gary Zimmerman said that after he received his projected student enrollment report, he sacrificed a much-needed reading specialist position and moved that teacher into a first-grade classroom.
“Every principal received the report. Some of us gained or lost a teacher, and some were able to maintain current staff,” he said.
Hopson said that not all of the 37 new positions would be matches for the qualifications of the 42 teachers whose jobs are being cut.
“Those positions will be mostly be in priority schools, schools with efficiency issues, schools that need gap closures and schools that have been rated level 1 or level 2 [the lowest scores on the state’s accountability system] for years,” Hopson said. “We’re going to deploy those teachers strategically.”
It is unclear how the district will sustain the new positions after the money is gone and as the district continues to experience drops in enrollment.
All teachers, including those being excessed, will receive bonuses based on their evaluation scores from last year in October.
Memphis-Shelby County Education Association president Keith Williams was surprised to learn the district reduced the number of teachers facing layoffs Thursday evening.
“It’s encouraging news, but we want to know if the teachers who’ve been waiting on the re-employment list can also take part in Monday’s fair,” Williams said. “They have been waiting to find positions as well.”
The district’s excessing guidelines require a principal ensure the school stays within state-mandated class-size requirements and provides all classes necessary for a student to graduate.
The district has gone through several rounds of job cuts in the past year. Close to 50 teachers are still on the district’s re-employment list, according to the M-SCEA. The M-SCEA filed a lawsuit arguing that tenured teachers should be placed in positions before other candidates and should not have to interview for a job.
At Thursday’s meeting, Hopson said that the district is likely to have some extra funds by the end of this coming year, due to reduced facilities costs after school closings and because so many staff resigned to work in the new municipal districts. He suggested the district might make a one-time payment to teachers to help them with health insurance payments. The board and the county would need to approve any use of those funds.
Board members suggested that the district act quickly to create a committee or work with local organizations and the justice system to identify where the missing students are and to encourage them to come back to school.
Board member Chris Caldwell also presented an update on the governor’s committee on BEP, the state’s funding formula for schools. He said that the committee recommended giving teachers around the state raises of either $5,000 or $10,000 in 2015-16. The state’s legislature would have to vote on that change.
Contact Tajuana Cheshier at tcheshier@chalkbeat.org and (901) 730-4013.
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