The Clayton County school board has decided to postpone any decision on budget cuts after learning this week that some teachers in the district’s Career Technical and Agricultural Education program are not getting their contracts renewed for next year.
After learning about the job cuts Monday, the board responded by saying it needs more information about the CTAE program and the number of students who’ll be affected before making further budget decisions.
Overall, about 170 teachers have been notified that their contracts have not been renewed for next year, school district spokesman David Waller said. Of those, about 20 are CTAE teachers.
Clayton County currently has 102 teachers in the CTAE program, so it would be about a 20 percent reduction.
Waller cautioned that “the numbers are very fluid at this point and that’s why it’s hard to nail anything down.”
He said since the school board has the final say on the budget it can still go back and make additional changes once it gets more information from the superintendent.
The board wants Superintendent Edmond Heatley to clear up questions surrounding the program by today, when it conducts the first of three public hearings on the budget.
In his presentation to the board Monday, Heatley said the district’s anticipated revenues for next school year total about $338 million while expenditures are about $332.8 million.
But some board members said they’re not getting enough information from the superintendent to make informed decisions.
“The board is not comfortable with the things we’re hearing about the CTAE program,” school board Chairwoman Pam Adamson said. “We just don’t have a good feel for what’s happening. Frankly, it is not what we understood was going to happen. We’re getting conflicting reports. We want a good picture of what’s going on.”
As it stands now, said school board member Jessie Goree, Forest Park High School’s construction class, which has about 160 students who regularly participate in the Habitat for Humanity building projects, is possibly in jeopardy, as is Riverdale High School’s engineering and technology program, which has 130 students.
“We need, in writing, what the [cost-cutting] plan is,” Goree said. “We don’t know what the plan is.”
The potential cuts in Clayton’s career and technical training program come four months after Gov. Nathan Deal launched Go Build Georgia, an initiative aimed at creating more skilled trade and technical workers by beefing up training programs in Georgia’s secondary schools.
Meanwhile, Sid Chapman, president of the Clayton County Education Association, complained that the fate of another 20 teachers is in limbo until Tuesday, the district’s deadline to hand out contracts for next year.
Chapman called the district’s decision to wait until May 15 to tell some teachers about their fate “insensitive.”
While a number of options for dealing with the district’s budget problems have been discussed and then withdrawn — including eliminating middle school sports — Chapman said he believes there’s “more teachers [being] cut than the board realized.
“I don’t think the board’s getting a clear picture and I don’t think they have had a clear picture in the last few years,” he said. “I don’t think they know what questions to ask. They’re afraid of crossing the line into micromanaging. In the past, where some of the boards went too far, this board doesn’t go far enough.”
Adamson said the school board could reverse the decision not to renew teachers’ contracts, if warranted.
“Their notices could be reversed and they could wind up getting a contract,” she said. “A tenured employee has a right to question why they didn’t get a contract. There could be hearings that come out of this.”
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