The prospect of losing teachers to layoffs is daunting for both students and teachers. For students, they lose part of their connections to the school and for the teachers they lose their job and their means of income. Luckily, the truth behind these “layoffs” is a bit lighter than popular initial conceptions. Even if the idea of them is scary, Jared Phelps cleared up confusion regarding this process.
“‘Layoffs’ is a challenging word because my understanding is that when someone is laid off, they do not have a job anymore. And at this point, no one has been laid off in our district,” Phelps said.
Confirming that teachers are not losing their jobs, Phelps continued by explaining the reasons why schools may “shrink” so to speak and how that influences employment rates. The details of this occurring are up in the air however and there are other factors in play as well.
“The two reasons that are brought up most often are that our district is experiencing what is called ‘declined enrollment’ which means that next year, our district is predicted to have fewer students than we currently have. Part of the funding that our school district gets is based on the number of students coming to school,” Phelps said.
“Another cause is that some of these Teachers on Special assignment (TOSAs) at the district are funded through grants. So our district has gotten grants to support literacy, math and all sorts of other things, but grants do not last forever. There are a few grants that are expiring this year and because of that, some of the funding we normally have is disappearing. [This] means the funding is not there to fund those teachers anymore which means the district has to find other ways to fund them,” Phelps said.
The enrollment rate in particular seems to be a major factor. As there are fewer students, that means that there is less need for teachers as they would be considered “excess” as expanded upon by Principal Alexander Salazar.
“We will have fewer students attending next year than we did last year and sometimes people are potentially not hired back because of that, where they are on temporary contracts. But they are not ‘laid off’ because they are on temporary contracts,” Salazar said.
Both Salazar and Phelps referred to “teachers on temporary contracts” and explained that these teachers are the most likely to not return to work due to the expiration of their contracts at the end of each year. Something that should be taken into consideration is that this does not apply to all teachers as there are at least three different types of employment that a teacher may have within the district.
“Teachers who have been with a district for longer have tenure, which means that they are a permanent employee. If you have tenure, the district more or less guarantees that you have a job somewhere,” Phelps said. “The next category of teachers are called probationary teachers. Teachers who are on probationary contracts have been with the district for a few years and are close to getting tenure, but do not have it yet. The third category of teachers are teachers on temporary contracts, sometimes called temporary teachers. Teachers that are on temporary contracts usually have not been with the district for very long and are not guaranteed to come back to the district next year.”
The details of long-term contracts are not well known however nor are the conditions needed for tenure. As for a teacher’s perspective, Raymond Chhan, English teacher for the 9th, 11th and 12th grades, explained his conception of being tenured.
“Generally, when you first get hired, you are on a temporary contract. After a certain amount of time–I do not know who dictates it–we have gone on a probationary contract. After that, you are tenured. For me, it took about two to three years after I got hired.”
While the issue of declining enrollment was touched upon by Phelps, the underlying causes of the declining enrollment were less tangible. There were a number of theories that some had come up with for this to happen, and as with most theories, the truth may lie somewhere in the middle.
“We truly do not know [why],” Salazar said. “Some have said it is because of students from COVID still choosing to stay home and be homeschooled. Other people say they are going to other charter schools. Some say [students] move away. What we know is declining enrollment is happening everywhere. So, one of the primary reasons that I believe [in] is simply there are [just] not as many children [now] as in the past.”
In summary, for the layoffs to occur there require a number of different variables, all of which are based on what the district needs at the moment. It is important to understand the timetable for the expiration of temporary teacher contracts.
“There are teachers that are on temporary contracts which means they start at the beginning of the year, [around] July. Then, their contract expires in June, the last day of school. So depending on the needs of the district, which we will not know until next July, those teachers are either hired back or not,” Salazar said.
While the phrasing of this may seem like a yearly occurrence, the students may take solace in knowing that these layoffs are not as common as they may be made out to be.
“As far as I know, and in my experience, they have not happened frequently so they are pretty rare. I know that it is in situations that are really extreme like financial issues within the district. I feel like that normally, it has not happened that much. In the beginning of my teaching career, when there were some issues, it was a really scary thought for sure,” Chhan said.
Should layoffs ever occur, what should be remembered is that these are not exactly layoffs and that they are largely unlikely to happen and will never happen to any career teachers here. It can be best described as the average life cycle of a school.
“What is going to happen this year is that the temporary contract for those teachers will end. The schools will post positions, but the first teachers to get opportunities for those positions are teachers from other places in the district who need jobs and places to come,” Phelps said.
