blogging on education in Worcester, in Massachusetts, and in America
Monday, January 25, 2010
That's a few more zeros...
Putting Worcester's numbers in perspective (nationally): New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is warning that NYC may have to layoff 8500 teachers next year.
That would be the equivalent of about 164 WPS teachers. NYC employees over 80,000 teachers; WPS is around 1600. Based on early numbers, NYC may be faring better than WPS.
One wonders, though, if Bloomberg's numbers are still based on using RTTT funds to fill the holes. That was Patterson's thought last week, and that's not going to fly with the fed.
RTTT funds may not be available for this purpose, but once the City officially cuts all these positions, they have established a way to use other federal funds, e.g., Title I, to pay for these teachers. As long as a district can show that these positions would not be filled if there were no federal funds to fill them, they are no longer in a supplanting situation. One case in point for WPS. Several years ago, the Parent Information Center staff was cut from the WPS budget--this was reported in the T&G. The City received an additional $1M in Title I funds. Since without these funds there would not have been a PIC (and there was proof of these cuts which we had to show to the auditors via the T&G article) the district is not in violation of supplement v supplant law EVEN if the City paid for these positions in the previous year. There have been other instances as well including several years ago when we had literacy facilitators as part of a state reading grant. The state suddenly pulled those dollars in Novemeber from every school district this allowing districts to use Title I or Title IIA (PD funds) to pay for these salaries.
3 comments:
That would be the equivalent of about 164 WPS teachers. NYC employees over 80,000 teachers; WPS is around 1600. Based on early numbers, NYC may be faring better than WPS.
One wonders, though, if Bloomberg's numbers are still based on using RTTT funds to fill the holes. That was Patterson's thought last week, and that's not going to fly with the fed.
RTTT funds may not be available for this purpose, but once the City officially cuts all these positions, they have established a way to use other federal funds, e.g., Title I, to pay for these teachers. As long as a district can show that these positions would not be filled if there were no federal funds to fill them, they are no longer in a supplanting situation. One case in point for WPS. Several years ago, the Parent Information Center staff was cut from the WPS budget--this was reported in the T&G. The City received an additional $1M in Title I funds. Since without these funds there would not have been a PIC (and there was proof of these cuts which we had to show to the auditors via the T&G article) the district is not in violation of supplement v supplant law EVEN if the City paid for these positions in the previous year. There have been other instances as well including several years ago when we had literacy facilitators as part of a state reading grant. The state suddenly pulled those dollars in Novemeber from every school district this allowing districts to use Title I or Title IIA (PD funds) to pay for these salaries.
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