Job cuts will combat the budget problem of the Syracuse City School District, says the district’s superintendent.
These cuts of 75 jobs will be done through attrition and not layoffs, Superintendent Daniel G. Lowengard said.
“To make the revenues and the expenditures match up, we have to reduce our cost,” Lowengard said as he recently laid out his proposed budget for 2008-09. “And the biggest cost are people.”
So instead of going out and hiring people then laying them off, he said, the district will simply not fill the 75 budgeted positions.
Teachers make 76 percent of the 4,200 employees in the district. So most job cuts out of the 75 will be in the teaching staff, Lowengard said. But, he had no fixed number for cuts in the teaching and the non-teaching staff.
Lowengard is proposing a $343.44-million budget. That leaves a deficit of $7 million. To him, the job cut is a quick fix for the district’s $7 million-deficit. But the proposal is also drawing criticism from teachers and advocates for parents.
Some highlights of the proposed budget:
Upgrade H.W. Smith and Ed Smith elementary schools to K-8.
Continue the work of constructing a new kind of city high school – Central Tech.
Start a Marine Corps Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program at Fowler High School.
Merge Solace Elementary School into Levy Middle School to make a new K-8 school.
The district wants to introduce a new middle-school alternative education program that will add $1.5 million to the proposed budget. But, Lowengard said, that this target is unachievable without more job cuts. So he is proposing to eliminate another 20 jobs over the 75.
Lowengard expressed happiness at the $343.44 million budget. The $7 million deficit this time, he said, is better than the last budget with a deficit of $21 million. The proposed budget now awaits the approval of the Common Council, which will not make a decision until late March.
In criticizing the budget’s job cuts, Kate McKenna, the president of the Syracuse Teachers Association, suggested Lowengard’s priorities are wrong. Last year, she said, the superintendent added several new administrative positions to the district offices. Now, a cut in the instructional staff should be the last resort. Otherwise, McKenna said, this cut will increase the class size and decrease support for the student support.
Such cuts will only discourage “qualified teachers” from staying in the district, McKenna said. “This is because when the district cuts positions, newer teachers’ jobs are in jeopardy,” McKenna said. “This causes even those whose jobs are not threatened in a given year to leave the district.” This makes it easy for other districts to attract and retain those teachers, she said.
One Board of Education commissioner, Kim Rohadfox-Ceaser, agreed that the district is strapped for funding and needs to cut cost. But she found Lowengard’s proposal unappealing.
“Job cuts are at this time our only way to balance the budget unless there is an infusion of cash from local, state and federal levels,” she said. “However,” she added, “that does not mean I think it’s a good idea.”
Rohadfox-Ceaser expressed dissatisfaction over the budget because it “inadequately” addresses the needs of struggling students. It does not provide any additional support to them. And, she said, losing personnel will affect even the existing support, while forcing the school authorities to increase the class size
But Superintendent Lowengard disputed that the cuts will affect students. He contended that the student-to-teacher ratio in the school districts of Alabany, Buffalo, Niagara Falls, and Utica is approximately 12 is to one. Syracuse has about 10 students for every one teacher. So adding two students to each class will not drastically change the class size, he said.
Bob Gardino, the president of Parents for Public Schools, disagreed. The larger class size will affect the students, he said. The larger class size, he said, has caused many parents to worry about how well their own child will do in oversized classes. “They are concerned at an individual level,” he said, about their child in a particular school. “It is,” he added, “a personal crisis.”
(Trina Joshi is a graduate student in magazine-newspaper-online journalism.)
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