photo by: Journal-World

The Lawrence school district offices, 110 McDonald Drive.

With school closures and dozens of teacher cuts on the table, the two unions that represent the Lawrence school district’s teachers and staff want the school board to also consider restructuring or cuts of district administration.

Superintendent Anthony Lewis recommended a budget package that included multiple school closures and the elimination of at least 50 teaching positions, but no reductions to district administrator positions or salaries. Lawrence school board members recently voted to hold public hearings for two school closures, Broken Arrow and Pinckney elementaries, and to cut as many as 50 teachers across the middle and high school levels at the district’s brick and mortar schools and the Lawrence Virtual School.

Representatives for both unions say reductions should not only come down on teachers and staff, and that district administration should also be examined. Other concerns include the effects of the proposed cuts on teacher workloads and students.

Emerson Hoffzales, interim president of the Lawrence Education Association, the union that represents teachers and other certified staff, said that in a letter to Lewis and the board, the LEA asked for a list of all district positions and their job responsibilities. Hoffzales, who uses they/them pronouns, said that while they don’t necessarily think there can be any more cuts to administrative positions, the district could be more efficient.

“I think we need to be very intentional with figuring out and restructuring district positions from top to bottom to make sure that we are using our funds to the best of our ability,” Hoffzales said.

One of the main drivers of the budget reductions is to provide raises to district teachers and staff, but Hoffzales said that the proposal to use school closures and teacher cuts, which come with increased class sizes, to help fund those raises puts teachers in a difficult position. They said teachers are already struggling to manage heavy workloads, and cutting teaching positions and increasing class sizes will only intensify those struggles.

“The workload will definitely increase with that, and that’s something that we want to avoid,” Hoffzales said.

Hoffzales spoke to those issues in comments to the Lawrence school board at its most recent meeting Monday. Hoffzales said the increase in class sizes will be on top of all the other responsibilities teachers have, including the addition of multigrade classes at the elementary level, the implementation of various district initiatives, piloting new curriculum, and trainings.

“These things together make it impossible or near impossible to complete our work within the confines of our contract day,” Hoffzales told the board. “And increasing our workload and paying us more money isn’t a raise — it’s paying us for the additional hours we would be spending doing our job.”

Hoffzales also told the board that teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions, and students will be negatively impacted too. Speaking in more detail to the Journal-World, Hoffzales said that as an English teacher they already have about 146 students across all their sections, and adding more students to that number will only make it more difficult for them to meet the academic and social and emotional needs of their students.

“My students will not get me at 100% or close to,” Hoffzales said. “I have to divide myself with 146 students.”

In a letter to the school board, the Personnel Association of Lawrence — Communication Workers of America, the union representing the district’s classified staff, calls for reductions to the district’s administrative budget as well. In the letter, PAL-CWA expresses concern that the district is considering school closures, increased class sizes and cuts to student programs but not also considering a cut to district administration or a small-percentage pay decrease for employees making over $100,000 per year.

Hannah Allison-Natale, president of PAL-CWA, said that with all the other reductions currently on the table, the union thinks administrative reductions should also occur.

“If we’re talking about school closures, if we’re talking about increasing class ratios, we do think that it is not unreasonable to ask that there also be another budget cut this year from the administrative budget,” Allison-Natale said.

Allison-Natale said that while PAL-CWA recognized that other cuts are necessary and only making cuts to administration would not be enough to free up the funding needed for teacher and staff raises, the district should make sure administrators also make sacrifices.

“I think everyone has been asked to sacrifice in our community, so we definitely want to make sure that we’re spreading out that sacrifice, right?” Allison-Natale said. “As classified staff we have been sacrificing for years: not making a living wage, living in our cars, living on public assistance. And so absolutely I think if we’re cutting, we need to leave no stone unturned.”

For a couple of years, PAL-CWA has been pushing the district to increase all classified staff pay to a living wage, which it emphasized in the letter to the board. The living wage in Lawrence is $16.04 an hour for a single adult with no children, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator. The letter states that there are approximately 410 classified employees earning less than $16 per hour, with 320 of those employees making between $9.70 and $14.00 per hour. It goes on to say that the district has lost nearly 100 hourly employees this school year, and that the district’s low pay is the number one reason those employees have cited for leaving.

Allison-Natale said by the union’s count, that means there has been turnover in a fifth of the district’s classified positions since August, and though the positions have been mostly refilled, that inconsistency is not good for kids.

“I don’t think that we can underestimate the impact that that’s having on our students, whether that’s a paraeducator or a custodian or a food service worker,” Allison-Natale said. “It is so important that students have trusted adults in their lives.”

The district will also consider other potential cuts that have to be negotiated with both unions. Those include reductions in district payments to 403b retirement accounts and the elimination of a collaborative plan time for middle school teachers. Allison-Natale said that PAL-CWA opposes the 403b cuts and that taking money from employees’ retirement to increase their pay now does not constitute a raise. The district estimates the reduction of the middle school planning time will enable the district to cut another 20 teachers, which Hoffzales said not only eliminates valuable time for teachers to coordinate, but further contributes to concerns about teacher workload and student learning.

Both Allison-Natale and Hoffzales also stressed that ultimately, the district’s budget issues are rooted in inadequate state funding. Both urged the community to call for fully funded schools at the state level.

“We are absolutely concerned about the whole picture of what’s happening with school funding in our state,” Allison-Natale said. “We are in a crisis statewide and I think it is really important that we as a community, and as school staff across the state, come together to fight for actually fully funded schools.”

Hoffzales added that they thought the school board had done a good job of asking questions regarding the budget proposal, and also encouraged community members to continue to attend local board meetings to make their questions heard.