DC educators prepare for anticipated job losses following Mayor Bowser’s budget plan

Teachers and staff in Washington, D.C.’s public schools fear there may be 200 positions cut due to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s new budget proposal.

While Bowser included in her city’s budget proposal a 12% increase to District of Columbia Public Schools’s funding formula, giving schools an additional $181 million, schools are still likely to fall short of meeting their budgetary needs. The shortfall comes as money from one-time federal pandemic aid depletes, teacher’s salaries have increased, and city revenue remains stagnated.

Bowser’s budget proposal, which still needs to be approved by the council, violates a 2022 law that was designed to ensure that public schools received the same amount of funding they did the year before. This is the second year in a row that Bowser has disregarded the law, per the Washington Post.

The reduction in staff would represent 2% of people who work in schools, but it will be felt in schools in nearly every ward of the city. Wards 2 and 5 are the only parts of the city that will see an increase in staff come 2025. Ward 8, which includes some of the most underresourced areas of the city, will reportedly experience the highest number of lost positions with 99.

A loss in positions would mean bigger class sizes, but they could also mean a loss in specialized roles such as behavioral counselors. The school budgets are also determined by how many students need specialized services, meaning schools get more funding for “at-risk” children who are homeless, in foster care, or live in low-income homes.

Between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years, schools received $65 million in “stability funding” to help schools maintain staffing when enrollment fluctuates. For this coming school year, the one-time funding will drop to just $11 million.

“Because we don’t have the one-time funding that we’ve had to hold schools at what they had the year before, you are naturally going to see some reductions,” Lewis Ferebee, District of Columbia Public Schools chancellor, told the outlet. “If your enrollment was decreasing and you still have the same number of staff, that cliff that you now have is going to be steeper. You’ve got more to right-size because you’ve been funded at a level of students that have no longer been in your building.”

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The school system received $304 million in federal pandemic aid, leading to the hiring of more staff. Since the pandemic, full-time positions in schools grew by 18%, but enrollment has only grown by 3% since the 2020-21 school year, per Ferebee.

“We knew though at that time that we couldn’t sustain that level of increase in perpetuity,” he said. “The challenge of this moment is we’re now there where we’re phasing out the last elements of that investment.”