New school staff lose jobs as COVID funding disappears

Erica Popoca’s ninth-grade English language learners were furious in the spring when she told them she would not return to teaching in the 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 run out. The first to be let go were new teachers like Popoca. Her students wrote letters urging school board members to change their minds.

Popoca, an advisor and founder of a multilingual student club, worried about losing connections with the Latino students she had taught for two years and who culturally identified with her as a Latina and one of the few Spanish-speaking teachers at the school.

Ultimately, the district found other ways to pay her, and officials reversed the layoffs, which turned out to be beneficial for her and her students.

Popoca is one of thousands of teachers and school staff across the U.S. who are at risk of losing their jobs as districts balance their budgets and brace for a shortage when COVID-19 relief funds expire. Districts are scrambling to fill unfunded positions. The reality is that many students will lose contact with adults they’ve built relationships with in recent years.

The Biden administration has awarded $189.5 billion to schools 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 spend the rest of their money, and districts will no longer be able to pay for nonteaching staff positions with that money after Sept. 30.

Schools across the country have spent most of their relief money on paying teachers and support staff, according to an analysis of school district spending for fiscal year 2022 by the U.S. Department of Education. Districts across the country are laying off recently hired teachers, teaching assistants, counselors, restorative justice coordinators and other key school staff or looking for ways to retain them.

A recent survey of 190 district leaders by the nonprofit research group Rand found that teacher layoffs were the “most common budget cut” that officials expected. Talk of layoffs surfaced in at least 28 districts ahead of the coming financial crisis, according to a media tracker from Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, a research center that tracks potential layoffs in districts.

Layoffs in the wake of the pandemic have been widespread. Helena Public Schools in Montana eliminated 36 positions, including 21 teachers. Arlington Independent School District in Texas eliminated 275 positions, including counselors, tutors and support staff.

New teachers are the first to leave in states that allow or require districts to use “last in, first out” policies that protect tenured teachers — and many of those laid off will be employees of color, said Aaron Pallas, a professor of sociology and education at Columbia University. States that have diversified their teaching staffs in the past few years will see that progress reversed because “recently hired staff, who are often more diverse,” will be “more likely to be laid off than experienced staff, who are often traditionally white,” he said.

Schools that serve low-income students will see the biggest change in funding because those campuses have received more federal aid money, Pallas said.

Schools were required to follow certain equity laws when committing aid money. Ending the funding will disproportionately impact students of color and children from high-poverty neighborhoods.

Popoca, who is from the Bronx in New York, worries about the toll these losses will take on her school.

“I am reassured but cautious because there are still a lot of positions open,” she said. “We don’t have as many staff as we should have, and I am concerned about how the lack of staff will affect the students and the school.”

Which states are most at risk of losing new teachers?

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 dismissal decisions, according to a 2023 analysis by Educators for Excellence, a New York nonprofit that supports state laws that eliminate seniority-based considerations from dismissal decisions. Some other states, including Connecticut, where Popoca lives, allow districts to consider seniority in dismissal decisions, among other factors, but they are not required to do so. Some states prohibit districts from considering seniority as a factor.

Because young teachers typically begin their careers in underserved schools, schools could see a large percentage of their staff lose, said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

“It’s really bothering the students,” Roza said. “And it’s not good for the teachers.”

When Popoca told her class of mostly black and Latino eighth-graders that she would be laid off, they were devastated. She is one of a handful of new employees of color returning to the district this year. Several of her colleagues lost their jobs in the spring and won’t be returning when school starts, she said.

What should families expect in schools?

In addition to layoffs due to emergency funding, Roza said, many teachers may leave of their own accord. Some districts may also try to reduce their staffing pool through turnover rather than layoffs.

“They will hope and pray that the teachers will just go away,” Roza said.

Most of the cuts will likely fall on the pool of support staff that has been bolstered during the pandemic to help children recover, Columbia’s Pallas said.

Counselors, nurses, restorative justice coordinators and teaching assistants who have joined the campus staff in recent years will be leaving, and students and their school communities will begin to feel that loss as early as the beginning of this school year, he added.

Francis Pina is one of several employees, and one of the few Black men, hired by Boston Public Schools to train teachers to incorporate social-emotional learning into classroom instruction. Late last year, he learned that his role and the positions of most of the new hires on his staff would be terminated because they were considered short-term. Boston Public Schools paid Pina emergency COVID-19 money through the end of the previous academic year.

Pina will return to the high school this year as a math teacher, but she worries about what will happen to the district’s social-emotional skills curriculum.

When he heard his role was ending, Pina said he was upset because he felt it was “really important to support students” who were still struggling academically, socially and emotionally due to the pandemic. He says students in the district haven’t come to grips with all of those losses, even as the district has returned to “status quo.”

As a black man who attended Boston public schools, he believes he offers a unique perspective to children, including black students, and helps them thrive academically and emotionally in school.

“Prioritizing is important,” Pina said. “Children need to know we care about them.”

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Teacher diversity will regress

Diversity among the teaching staff has improved in recent years in Massachusetts, where Pina teaches. But the latest statewide policy means schools will lose out on diversity in their workforces, said Roza, of the Georgetown research lab.

That’s a problem, considering that students of color make up the majority of public schools in the U.S. Nearly a quarter of public schools did not have a teacher of color on staff, according to a May analysis of state data by TNTP, a nonprofit focused on the needs of students of color and those living in poverty. Research shows students of color achieve better academic results when they have teachers from different backgrounds

The reason is surprising: Why are there not a single black teacher in many schools?

Campus representation could decline further once emergency funding ends.

To prevent those losses and reverse the length-of-service exemptions, some lawmakers have tried to change the way the exemptions work, but they’ve run into resistance from the state teachers union, which says the policy hurts protections for older teachers. In March, the Massachusetts legislature rejected parts of education bills that would have removed the length-of-service consideration for exemptions.

“While we are encouraged that the Legislature is taking steps to increase teacher diversity in Massachusetts, it is disheartening that the Board of Education has not chosen to prioritize protecting these teachers from district layoffs,” Lisa Lazare, executive director of Educators for Excellence Massachusetts, said in a news release.

Roza said more new workers of color are expected to be laid off this year.

For now, Popoca, from Connecticut, can’t wait to get back into the classroom and see her students — many of whom come from Latin American countries and to whom she feels a special connection. She worries about the cuts, she says, because the school needs more teachers and support staff, not less.

She had heard from people she knew who had considered teaching jobs in Hartford or elsewhere but had backed out because the district didn’t have the money.

““It’s really disturbing,” she said.

Contact Kayla Jimenez at [email protected]. Follow her on X: @kaylajjimenez.

New school staff lose jobs as COVID funding disappears

Which states are most at risk of losing new teachers?

What should families expect in schools?

Teacher diversity will regress

By meerna

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