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Dive Brief:
- Staff hiring freezes and layoff notices have risen quickly in districts nationwide in recent months as school boards grapple with declining enrollment and budget shortfalls.
- For example, Boston Public Schools proposed cutting 678 full-time roles in its fiscal year 2027 budget, Virginia’s Richmond Public Schools plans to eliminate 46 full-time positions in its central office, and School District of Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington has called for cutting 130 vacant central office positions.
- This trend comes as annual school district budgets are being ironed out this spring and layoff notice deadlines loom, according to an April 7 post by the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
Dive Insight:
A common thread among some districts facing staff reductions is that not only is enrollment dropping but they also increased their full-time staff notably in recent years.
Boston Public Schools added 1,341 full-time employees between the 2018-19 and 2024-25 school years, raising its full-time employee count by 18% to 8,999, according to an Edunomics Lab K-12 workforce analysis tool. By contrast, enrollment fell 10% — or by 5,339 students — in the same period.
Similar patterns can be seen in Richmond and Philadelphia, according to Edunomics Lab’s findings. Between 2018-19 and 2024-25, Richmond Public School’s full-time employee count jumped 31% while student enrollment decreased by 15%, and The School District of Philadelphia increased its full-time staff by 7% as student enrollment dropped 9%.
The hiring surge came as some districts invested in staff with portions of their federal emergency pandemic funds. Congress allocated a historic one-time influx of $189.5 billion in federal K-12 pandemic relief funds, the last of which was spent in March.
“Districts can only spend what they bring in,” Edunomics wrote in its April 7 post. “Fewer students means fewer dollars and that makes the math unavoidable: many districts won’t be able to maintain their pandemic-era staffing levels.”
Some district layoff notices are beginning to clash with union negotiations, as seen recently in both Los Angeles Unified School District and San Francisco Unified School District.
In February, LAUSD approved a plan to move forward with reduction-in-force notices for 657 employees, mostly central office staff.
Since then, the district’s unions have pushed back, calling for an end to layoffs in a March rally. More recently, the United Teachers of Los Angeles alongside two other district staff unions announced plans to strike on April 14 unless labor negotiations are resolved. Days before the planned strike, UTLA and the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles reached tentative labor agreements with LAUSD.
San Francisco Unified School District announced in February it would send layoff notices in March, with final staffing decisions made in May. The move came shortly after the district’s educators union staged a four-day strike that culminated in an agreement that gives classified staff an 8.5% raise and certificated staff a 4% raise.
“Over the past five years, enrollment has dropped by 6%. We may have even fewer students next year,” said Superintendent Maria Su in the district’s layoff announcement. “Final numbers will be confirmed in March, but we must plan now using current estimates. We cannot keep staffing at past levels if we are serving fewer students.”
