More teachers are facing layoffs this spring as school districts handle declining enrollments, inflation-related budget challenges, and the wind-down of federal pandemic relief funds.

San Diego Unified School District, for instance, announced plans in March to cut over 220 full-time positions, with 127 educators expected to be among those laid off. The anticipated staff reductions come as the California district seeks to offset a $93.7 million budget shortfall in the 2024-25 school year and grapples with a $163.7 million shortfall expected the following school year. 

Smaller districts are facing similar budget challenges. 

In Massachusetts, Public Schools of Brookline proposed budget reductions in March to address a roughly $2.2 million funding gap. Suggested staff cuts include all elementary foreign language teachers, four elementary literacy coaches and half of the district’s technology specialists.

Layoffs could also be on the horizon for Oregon’s Portland Public Schools. Then-superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero flagged a need for $30 million in cuts for the district’s 2024-25 budget in a February letter to families. Few details have emerged, but it’s expected that half of the cuts would be made at the school level, with the remainder coming from the district’s central office operations. 

Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, has long forecasted teacher layoffs would increasingly pop up across the country — for both this year and next — as school district enrollments continued to decline, and as the deadline to obligate federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief dollars nears in late September. 

The Edunomics Lab is tracking local news reports on teacher layoffs, and Roza said her team has noticed more schools this year are announcing cuts to instructional roles.

Declining enrollment is not a new trend for some districts, but ESSER funds allowed school leaders to delay budget cuts that would have occurred otherwise, Roza said. 

“When the ESSER money came, it basically provided a stay of execution in the sense that there’s all this extra money, so you didn’t need to do the shrinking, right now, of your system,” Roza said. But now districts “have to do the last four years of shrinking all at once instead of doing it gradually year by year. In fact, some of them, instead of shrinking, hired new people. So it’s kind of a double whammy.”

Additionally, inflation drove some districts to give higher than normal pay raises for staff, she said. “Now, though, for those pay raises, they may have to lay people off.”

One example can be seen in San Diego, where the district avoided a teacher strike in May 2023 when it reached an agreement with the San Diego Education Association. The union contract guaranteed a retroactive 10% pay increase for the 2022-23 school year and a 5% raise for the 2023-24 school year. 

Portland Public Schools also warned of major budget cuts in the near future after it reached a three-year, $175 million contract with its teachers union in November. The agreement, which included a 13.8% cumulative cost-of-living increase for all educators districtwide, came after the union’s strike shut down Portland schools for 11 days. 

How to best approach layoffs

Some labor union contracts include provisions specifying how districts can carry out staff layoffs, Roza said. 

During contract negotiations, she said, contract clauses dictating how districts approach staff reductions should be closely reviewed. “Because districts may have provisions in there that they forgot about, that say ridiculous things like ‘We’re going to start in reverse order of who is hired’ regardless of the value the teacher brings. We should be protecting our most effective teachers.”

Roza cited one example in Michigan’s Ann Arbor Public Schools, where the union contract states that the last several digits of a teacher’s Social Security number would be the tiebreaker for layoffs after considering years of experience with the district. The teacher with the lowest Social Security number in the event of a tie will be considered to have the most seniority.

Seniority-based layoffs have raised concerns over the years since that can negatively impact racial diversity. That’s because teachers of color are more likely to be in the earlier stages of their careers compared to White educators. 

Still, seniority continues to be one of the two most common factors districts use for determining layoffs, according to a February 2023 analysis of 148 of the nation’s largest districts by the National Council on Teacher Quality. The other top factor considered is teacher performance.

Seniority-based policies are also more likely to harm high-poverty schools, which tend to hire less experienced teachers, Roza said. “You don’t have to use seniority in how to lay off [educators]. You could just say, ‘We’re going to maybe reduce some of our more expensive, less effective programs.’”

Attrition should be avoided in layoff strategies, if possible, because it could lead to leaving hard-to-fill subjects like math and science with fewer teachers, Roza added. 

District leaders should be communicating about layoffs to employees and their school communities as early and as often as possible, Roza said. It’s also crucial to communicate which instructional subjects are safe from staff reductions — if that's the case. 

Otherwise, last-minute announcements about pending layoffs will catch the community off-guard, making it more difficult for the school board to vote on its budget if public reactions are pouring in, Roza said.