Are layoffs coming for MPS?

Every year for the past three years, Milwaukee Public Schools has cut hundreds of teaching positions from its budget. The result is the kind of mess that exists at my high school--class sizes of 35 or 40 are not uncommon. We have six-and-a-half English teachers in my department for 1500 students, and English is a four-year requirement. Further results include the total elimination of art and music programs at the elementary level, and bare-minimum phy-ed classes. The district has been hiring few new teachers, unless those teachers are certified for science, math, or special ed.

Now comes word that four more schools will likely close next year, including Juneau High School.

Some of you may remember earlier this month when I noted that the superintendent finally kept one of his appointments with the staff at my school and met with us. Our fear had been that he was going to tell us he was shutting us down and re-opening a bunch of small schools in a "multiplex" at our building. This is a process done--badly so far--at a few other schools in the district. I hear from teachers and former students that there is not a lot of success so far, and the teachers, especially, feel jerked around and treated unprofessionally. (My board member, Joe Dannecker, believes the opposite to be true, but what are you gonna do?)

The superintendent is not going to multiplex my school, it turns out. This is good. However, he wants to close the school to new ninth-graders next year--meaning in 2006-2007, we'd have only 10th, 11th, and 12th grade students. In many respects, having no ninth-graders would be great; frankly, I'd be happy to get rid of some of the ones I'm teaching right now. But the loss of those students would devastate our staff--we would lose a quarter of our teachers, including all the young, enthusiastic, most-likely-to-embrace-innovation teachers. This would not be good. Where would those 15 or 16 teachers go? How could my English department survive on just four-and-a-half teachers?

Then I read about the recommendation to close Juneau, and it hit me: They are softening us up for layoffs next year.

When the 900 students from Juneau need a place to go, and the 400 freshmen who would have been at my school need a place to go, the district can be careful to spread them out among the remaining large high schools and the struggling small high schools so that the student counts are just right to justify eliminating 100 more high school teaching positions. Just wait.

And rather than following the pattern of the past couple of years wherein they let attrition take care of the cuts in teaching staff, I would not be surprised if this coming year the cuts come in the form of layoffs. Our enrollment is not significantly down--about 7000 students since 1998--and yet more than 800 teaching positions have been cut in recent years. The next cuts will be devastating.