As school districts prepare to approve their fall budgets, many are grappling with how to make up the huge gap created by the loss of federal pandemic relief funding.
For many, this means looming educator layoffs. But the ESSER “funding cliff” — the fall deadline for school districts to allocate money from final disbursements of elementary and secondary school emergency relief grants — is not the only cause of staff cuts taking place across the country.
The San Diego School District decided in early March to cut about 430 positions, roughly half of whom will be educators, to address a $94 million budget shortfall.
The Arlington Independent School District in Texas announced earlier this year that it would lay off 275 school employees.
A Portland, Oregon, school district is planning campus-specific job cuts to offset a looming $30 million budget deficit.
Even before the federal government cut off billions of dollars in emergency funding for schools, declining student enrollment already had school districts fretting about how they would balance the books. Overall public school enrollment is expected to continue to decline through 2040, and education consulting firm McKinsey & Company says urban areas will take the hit.
The company analyzed that “the U.S. birth rate and immigration rate were decreasing even before the outbreak of COVID-19, leading to a decrease in the number of school-age children.” “The pandemic has accelerated this trend and shifted enrollment from traditional public schools to charter schools, homeschools, and private schools.”
And there are other factors straining local budgets, including stagnant state funding, expensive building repairs and rising costs due to inflation. In Kansas, for example, the Wichita School District board decided to close six aging schools rather than lay off 230 staff (cuts to administrative staff and programs are still being discussed).
Experts at Georgetown University called it a “perfect storm of financial chaos” in a report from the Brookings Institution, and available ESSER data shows that half of federal emergency funding was spent on labor costs and hiring.
Researchers raised warnings last summer that budget shortfalls could cause massive disruption for students in high-poverty districts who received more ESSER funding.
“Leaders will have to cycle through an arduous process as they consider eliminating staff positions, programs and extracurricular activities,” they wrote. “In some areas, leaders may have to grapple with school closures, larger class sizes and delayed pay increases.”
That's already happening in places like San Diego. Community members told local leaders how they are being affected by budget cuts during a meeting where board members approved the cost-cutting plan.
“We already lost a teacher earlier this year and our class was the class that was going to fail,” one student said during a public comment period reported by NBC San Diego. “Many of my classmates and I all had to take different classes.”