Erica Popoca’s ninth grade English students were livid in the spring when she told them she wouldn’t be back to teach this fall.
The district where she works in Hartford, Connecticut, terminated her contract because the COVID-19 relief money that covered her salary was about to dry up. Newer teachers such as Popoca were the first to be cut. Her students wrote letters urging school board members to change their minds.
Popoca, the founding adviser of the multilingual student club, worried she would lose bonds with Latino students she had taught for two years who identify with her culturally as a Latina and as one of the few teachers who speaks Spanish at the school.
The district ultimately came up with other funding to pay her, and in a win for her and her students, officials reversed the layoff.
Popoca is among the thousands of teachers and school staffers across the U.S. at risk of losing their jobs as districts balance their budgets and prepare for the shortfall after COVID-19 relief money expires. Districts have been scrambling to put unfunded staffers into different roles. The reality is that many students will lose contact with adults with whom they have built relationships in recent years.
The Biden administration granted schools $189.5 billion over the past few years through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) under the American Rescue Plan Act. School officials have until the end of September to commit the remainder of their money, and districts will no longer be able to pay for nonteaching staff roles with that money after Sept. 30.
Schools nationwide used most of their relief fund money to pay for classroom teachers and support staff, according to a U.S. Department of Education analysis of district spending for fiscal year 2022. Districts across the country are now laying off recently hired educators, teaching assistants, counselors, restorative justice coordinators and other key staff at schools, or they’re scrambling to find ways to retain them.
A recent survey of 190 district leaders by the nonprofit research group Rand found that teacher reductions were “the most common budget cut” officials anticipated. Conversations about staff layoffs cropped up in at least 28 districts ahead of the upcoming fiscal cliff, according to a tracker of media reports from the Georgetown University-based research center Edunomics Lab, which monitors potential layoffs at districts.
The post-pandemic layoffs have been widespread. Montana’s Helena Public Schools cut 36 positions, including 21 teachers. The Arlington Independent School District in Texas cut 275 positions, including counselors, tutors and teaching support staff.
Newer teachers are the first to go in states that allow or require districts to use “last-in-first-out” policies, which protect tenured teachers – and many people terminated will be staffers of color, said Aaron Pallas, a professor of sociology and education at Columbia University. States that diversified their educator workforce in the past several years will see a backslide in that progress since “recently hired staff who are often more diverse” will be “laid off more than experienced staff who often are more traditionally white,” he said.
Schools serving low-income students will be hit hardest by the shift in funding because those campuses received more federal relief money, Pallas said.
Schools were required to comply with some equity provisions when obligating the relief money. The end of the funding will disparately affect students of color and kids in high-poverty neighborhoods.
Popoca, who comes from the Bronx in New York City, is concerned about what the losses will mean for her school.
“I am relieved but wary because quite a few positions are still vacant,” she said. “We don’t have the amount of staff we’re supposed to have, and I’m concerned about how the lack of staff is going to impact the students and the school.”
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At least 11 states – Alaska, California, Hawaii, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Rhode Island – last year had policies explicitly requiring districts to consider seniority in layoff decisions, according to a 2023 analysis from Educators for Excellence, a New York-based nonprofit organization that supports state laws that rid of seniority-based considerations from layoff decisions. Some other states, including Connecticut, where Popoca lives, allow districts to consider seniority in layoff decisions among other factors, but it’s not required. Some states ban districts from considering seniority as a factor.
Because junior teachers tend to begin their careers in higher-poverty schools, there could be cases in which schools lose high percentages of their staff, said Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab.
“It’s really disruptive for students,” Roza said. “And it’s not great for teachers.”
When Popoca told her class of mostly Black and Latino eighth graders last spring that she would be laid off, they were heartbroken. She’s one of a few new staffers of color returning to the district this year. A few of her colleagues lost their jobs in the spring and won’t be back when school starts, she said.
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What should families expect to see at schools?
In addition to the emergency funding layoffs, Roza said, many teachers may leave of their own accord. Some districts may also try to shrink their staffing pools with attrition rather than layoffs.
“They’re going to hope and pray teachers just leave,” Roza said.
Most of the cuts will likely hit the pool of support staff districts beefed up during the pandemic to help kids recover, Columbia’s Pallas said.
The counselors, nurses, restorative justice coordinators and teaching assistants added to campus staff in recent years will be gone, and students and their school communities will start to feel that loss by the start of this school year, he said.
Francis Pina is one of several staffers and one of few Black men hired by Boston Public Schools to train teachers how to infuse social-emotional learning into classroom teaching. At the end of last year, he learned his role and the jobs of most new staffers on his team would be dissolved because it was considered a short-term position. Boston Public Schools paid Pina with COVID-19 emergency money through the end of the past academic year.
Pina will return as a high school math teacher this year, but he worries about what will happen to the district’s social-emotional learning program.
When he heard his role was coming to an end, Pina said, he was nervous because he felt it was “really important to support students” still facing pandemic-related academic, social and emotional setbacks. He says students in the district haven’t worked through all of those losses, even if the district has gone back to the “status quo.”
As a Black man who attended Boston Public Schools, he believes he offers a unique perspective to kids, including Black students, and helps them thrive academically and emotionally in school.
“Prioritizing this is important,” Pina said. “Kids need to know we care about them.”
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Teacher diversification will face a setback
Diversity among the teaching staff has improved in recent years in Massachusetts, where Pina teaches. But the state’s last-in-first-out policy means schools will lose diversification in the workforce, Roza, from the research lab at Georgetown, said.
That’s a problem considering students of color are the majority at public schools in the U.S. Nearly one-fourth of public schools did not have an educator of color on staff, according to a May analysis of state-by-state data from TNTP, a nonprofit organization focused on the needs of students of color and those in poverty. Academic studies show students of color perform better academically when they have teachers from diverse backgrounds
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Representation on campuses may be further diminished when the emergency funding ends.
To stave off those losses and rescind seniority-based layoffs, some lawmakers tried to change how layoffs work, but they ran into pushback from the state teachers union, which said the policies harmed protections for senior educators. In March, the Massachusetts Legislature rejected sections of education bills that would have removed seniority considerations as the sole factor for layoffs.
“While we are happy to see the legislature taking strides to improve teacher diversity in Massachusetts, it is disheartening to see that the Education Committee chose not to prioritize protecting these very educators in the event of district layoffs,” Lisa Lazare, executive director of Educators for Excellence’s Massachusetts chapter, said in a news release.
More new staffers of color are expected to face layoffs this year, Roza said.
For now, Popoca, in Connecticut, is looking forward to returning to the classroom and seeing her students – many of whom come from Latin American countries and with whom she feels a special bond. She’s worried about the cuts, she says, because the school needs more teachers and support staff, not less.
She already has heard from people she knows who had considered entering the teaching profession in Hartford or elsewhere who have pulled back because of the district’s lack of money.
“It’s really concerning,” she said.
Contact Kayla Jimenez at kjimenez@usatoday.com. Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez.