Teacher reductions to make for larger classes for some students

photo by: Nick Krug

Bookbags crowd together on hooks in a second-grade classroom on the first day of school for Lawrence elementary schools in this file photo from Aug. 13, 2014.

Reductions in teaching staff made as part of the Lawrence school district’s budget for next school year will likely mean larger classes for students in several grades.

In order to account for the reduction of 17 full-time classroom teachers, district administrators increased the classroom threshold in third grade by two students and the teacher-student ratio at the middle schools by one student. District leaders say that while keeping classes as small as possible is preferred, the reduction to the teaching staff was necessary to help balance the budget.

“The reality is that we’ve got more students and no more money coming in, and so we have to figure out how to manage that,” said school board Vice President Shannon Kimball.

Combined with staff reductions made as part of last school year’s budget, 31 full-time teaching positions in the district have been eliminated in the past two years. Meanwhile, the overall enrollment in the district is increasing by hundreds per year.

Rising number of students

Enrollment in the district rose last year by about 250 students, and numbers are projected to increase by as much as 150 students next school year, according to district projections.

Enrollment growth has hurt the district’s budgets since the Legislature made changes to the school finance formula last year. Because school aid under the state’s temporary block grant system — in place for the previous and upcoming school years — is not calculated on a per-pupil basis as before, school districts do not automatically receive additional funds when enrollment increases.

Kimball said though the school board didn’t specifically discuss how reductions would affect class size in past board meetings, the impact was an implicit part of the budget conversation.

“I know that when we’re talking about having to make the budget balance because there’s no more money and we have more students, that means that somewhere our class sizes are going up,” Kimball said. “We can’t hire more teachers because we don’t have more money.”

The 17 teacher positions that will not be filled for the 2016-2017 school year consist of eight elementary, four middle school and five high school teachers. One districtwide nursing position was also not filled. Fourteen of those staff reductions were positions that were not filled after being vacated by either resignation or retirement, and the remaining three were high school elective teachers whose individual contracts were not renewed.

“We’ve been trying to put off having to make those huge cuts as long as we could, and we’re kind of at that place where we can’t keep doing that because there is no new money,” Kimball said.

Still, school board President Marcel Harmon said that staff reductions have been strategically made so as to reduce the effect on class sizes.

“I think we’ve been able to do the elimination of positions — which are minimal really up to this point compared to some districts — through efficiencies so that we’ve minimized the increases in class sizes,” Harmon said.

Elementary school level

Class-size thresholds are set by district policy and vary by grade and the socioeconomic level of the student population at each school. The increase in class size made at the third-grade level adds two students to the threshold for all three of the socioeconomic levels, bumping the levels from 23, 24 and 25 students per class to 25, 26 and 27.

For example, for the high-wealth elementary schools in the district — Langston Hughes, Quail Run and Deerfield — the third-grade threshold increases from 25 to 27 students. For the low-wealth elementary schools — Kennedy and New York — the third-grade threshold increases from 23 to 25 students. For the remaining elementary schools that fall into the middle socioeconomic category, it increases from 24 to 26 students.

Lawrence schools Superintendent Kyle Hayden said the adjustment was made to the third-grade level because they found Lawrence’s threshold was lower than that of some other districts.

“What we found was our third grade, comparatively, the thresholds were a little lower, and so we made a slight adjustment and moved it up two students,” Hayden said.

The two other elementary thresholds remained the same. The classroom threshold for kindergarten through second grade will continue to be 23/24/25 and the fourth and fifth grade threshold will continue to be 29/30/31.

Secondary school level

Class size is not tracked at the middle or high school level, and instead a student-to-teacher ratio is used for the core subject classes: English, math, science and social studies, Hayden said.

“They have an allocation of staffing, and they just distribute it how they need to,” Hayden said.

At the middle school level — where four positions were eliminated — the student-teacher ratio increased by one student, from 17.25 to 18.25. Hayden said an increase in class size as a result isn’t anticipated, but exact results won’t be known until school starts, and he doesn’t anticipate an increase in class size.

“It’s not as simple as elementary where you have self-contained classrooms and you assign kids to one classroom, and so when you’re building a student’s schedule you’re going to have a lot of different class-size numbers,” Hayden said. “So in your core classes, you’re going to try to keep it similar to the (23-31 student) range of elementary schools.”

Hayden said efficiencies were found at the high school level by combining some elective courses. Despite the reduction of five high school teachers for the upcoming school year, the student-teacher ratio at the high school level will remain at 21.5 to one.

The three teachers whose contracts were not renewed were all high school elective teachers: Joseph Bower, who taught STEM-related vocational classes at the Lawrence College and Career Center; Tim Sostarich, who taught film at Lawrence High School; and Melissa Reed, who taught business and marketing at Free State High School. Those teachers were notified in April that they were being laid off.

A pattern

The staffing reductions budgeted for the 2016-2017 school year are similar to cuts made as part of last school year’s budget.

As part of budget reductions for the 2015-2016 school year, about 14 teaching positions were eliminated — all the result of either resigned or retired positions that were not filled. Last year’s reductions included 11 elementary teachers and three secondary teachers. In addition, about five district-level positions were reduced, including a wellness coordinator, two administrative assistants and other support positions.

If enrollment continues to rise without additional funding from the state, district leaders have said more reductions are likely. Kimball said she thinks some public criticism about the staff reductions coming down harder on teachers than administrators isn’t fair, as the district has made some reductions to its central office staff. However, as the district attempts to curtail its deficit spending, Kimball said reducing more administrative positions isn’t off the table.

“We’re still continuing to look at that and certainly in the planning discussion that we’re going to be having this year about the budget deficit spending, that will be something that we’ll talk about further,” Kimball said.

Potential changes to the school finance formula

In March of 2015, lawmakers repealed the per-pupil school funding formula that had been in place for more than 20 years and replaced it for two years with the system of block grants. Lawmakers have said they plan to pass a new funding formula during the 2017 legislative session that would take effect during the 2017-2018 school year.

Kimball is hoping those changes will mean that funding will increase in coming years.

“It’s not reasonable for them to continue to say to us, ‘We want you to do more with less,'” Kimball said. “There comes a point in time where you can’t keep asking that of school districts every single year.”

In the midst of those changes, the Kansas Supreme Court has been reviewing a constitutional lawsuit that alleges school funding in the state is not equitable or adequate. The court ruled earlier this year that funding was not being distributed equitably among the state’s 286 school districts, and the Legislature made changes in June that were accepted by the court. In September, the court will begin its review of whether the overall amount of aid provided to schools is adequate.

Harmon said that the increases to elementary class-size thresholds and secondary student-teacher ratios could be walked back in the future if the budget situation improves, but he didn’t expect those changes to come quickly.

“From my perspective, at least as an individual board member, that would be a priority to look at,” Harmon said. “…They probably won’t be able to significantly increase funding next year, but they wouldn’t necessarily have to cut it any more, which would be good. It may take a couple years to recover from this, so we’ll have to wait and see.”

The budget for the upcoming school year was presented to the board at its July 25 meeting. The board’s budget hearing and approval will take place at 7 p.m. Aug. 8 at district offices, 110 McDonald Drive.