Franklin Pierce district looks to cut 60 teachers, staff

The Franklin Pierce School Board will consider cutting 60 full-time staff, including 41 teaching positions, next school year amid high expenses and declining enrollment.

The school district plans to reduce the annual budget by about $10 million due to enrollment decline and expenses projected to be higher than revenues this year, said Joel Zylstra, public information officer for the district. The board will hear a presentation on the budget June 4 and make a final decision June 18.

Most of the staff affected by the layoffs are classroom teachers, special educators, support staff and Learning Assistance Program specialists, the district confirmed with The News Tribune on Friday.

Zylstra also said that Black and brown teachers will be most impacted by the reductions due to seniority, and Keithley Middle School and Franklin Pierce High School will be seeing the most transfers.

There were 7,030 students and 568 certified instructional staff in the district in the 20232024 school year, according to a May 2024 school district presentation. The Franklin

Pierce School District includes an early-learning center, eight elementary schools, two middle schools and three high schools.

The district expected to spend about $127 million on personnel costs in 2023-2024, according to a May presentation. Zylstra said the district’s preliminary budget figures for 2024-2025 are between $138 million and $140 million.

The president of the school district’s certificated staffing union told The News Tribune the Franklin Pierce School District has not managed its funds well and overestimated enrollment in recent years, receiving fewer state funds as a result. The district said it is committed to monitoring its practices to ensure resources aren’t left on the table.

Less funding means fewer educators, larger class sizes and less money for activities, events, snacks and after-school programs, said TJay Johnson, president of the Franklin Pierce Education Association Executive Board. With students needing more classroom support and educators already burned out, Johnson said the decision would not only disrupt teachers but also disrupt student’s ability to connect and learn.

Zylstra said 60 full time posi

tions, including 32 classroom teachers, are expected to be cut in the 20242025 school year. Between 10-12 teachers will be transferred to different schools as well, he said.

The cuts include:

● Seven teachers each at Franklin Pierce High School and Washington High School

● Two teachers at GATES High School

● Eight teachers between Ford Middle School and Keithley Middle School Eight teachers across the district’s elementary schools

● Two certificated teacher support staff

● Two teacher mentors Four elementary learning specialists

● Two Multi-Tiered Systems of Support staff, one at each middle school

● One high school counselor

● Two assistant principal positions (one from each high school)

● Two executive director positions on the cabinet to the district’s executive leadership team

● Two IT positions

● Seven positions in the custodial department Three clerical/office staff positions

● One maintenance position

According to the 20232025 collective bargaining-agreement contract between the district and the Franklin Pierce Education Association, seniority and years of certificated experience in the field are the basis for retention in the case of employee staff reduction. Employees not recommended for retention shall be terminated and placed in an employment pool for possible re-employment for a period up to 36 months, the contract says.

ENROLLMENT, FUNDING MAIN FACTORS IN DECISION

School districts in Tacoma, Puyallup and Olympia also have had to make decisions on whether to lay off teachers and staff amid budget issues and declining enrollment.

The Franklin Pierce School District anticipates enrollment is down 10% from 2019, by around 700 students, which is the big driver for next school year’s cuts, Zylstra said.

“We were able to kind of hide behind some of the COVID relief money for a little bit because that provided an extra cushion,” Zylstra said. “But that is expiring this year as well.”

Cutting 60 full-time employees will save the district about $5.9 million in staffing costs and about $4 million in maintenance supplies and operational costs, he said.

“Our teaching capacity has plateaued, our enrollment has declined, we’re going to need to right size this at some point so we can sustain going forward,” Zylstra said. “Utilities and insurance and all the maintenance supplies, operations costs — those things have gone through the roof and our allocation from the state doesn’t reflect that.”

While enrollment has declined, district staffing has stayed the same or increased in some cases over the years, Zylstra said.

Zylstra said there were opportunities to pull staffing back as enrollment went down, but given the extra COVID relief funding the district was receiving and the “new and bigger demands on what schools are being asked to do,” he said, it “felt like an irresponsible thing to do given the needs and demands we were seeing at that time” regarding academics, student behaviors, social emotional needs, mental health needs and behavioral support.

In the 2023-2024 school year, the district received about $3 million less from the state than anticipated, which means class sizes will be increasing from a student-teacher ratio of about 12.4 students in 2023-2024 to 13.3 students per certified staff member in 2024-2025, Zylstra said.

Zylstra said the formula the state uses to allocate funding for teachers, counselors, nurses and principals “is not even close to what it actually takes to run a school,” so the district has had to “come to terms” with that fact and adjust accordingly. The state allocates about $10,000 per student, which can vary based on student needs, he said.

“In a perfect world, we would be able to maintain this. After all, investing in caring, skilled, committed adults is the best way to invest in students,” Zylstra said. “However, since the state funding is driven by enrollment, we cannot continue to invest to the levels that we have because our revenues are shrinking.”

When asked why enrollment has declined, Zylstra said some students have turned to online school, homeschooling or moved to another school district.

“But honestly, I don’t think we’ve got all the kids across our region or state or country accounted for,” he said. “I think there are just kids that are missing. So that’s real.”

Birth rates are also down overall and demographics are changing as more older people are moving to the district and “significantly” fewer kindergartners are enrolling in school, a trend the school district will have to anticipate and work to address in future capacity, staffing and budget conversations, he said.

DISTRICT MISSED OUT ON FUNDING, UNION SAYS

Johnson said he believes the school district hasn’t managed state money well. He also thinks the state hasn’t delivered on its promise to fully fund education under the 2012 McCleary decision.

The certificated staffing union estimates the district has lost out on $4 million over the course of several years for not meeting the state’s teacher-tostudent ratio, he said.

“It’s an average of about $1.1 million per year that we could have used to hire more educators for kindergarten through third grade,” Johnson said. “We’ve been bringing things up like that for the past three years in this association, at board meetings and labor-management meetings with the district. We’ve written about it to the board and the school district. And we’ve seen some changes. But what we haven’t seen is accountability for not taking actions.”

Zylstra said he couldn’t confirm those numbers but believes there might have been one or two years when the district missed out on funding because there were more students enrolled in classes.

“It’s trying to balance the reality and the incentive,” he said. “We’ve certainly heard [the union] loud and clear on this, and I think there’s been continued progress to work collaboratively. … We certainly will continue to monitor going forward and look at our practices to make sure there aren’t resources left on the table.”

CUTS COME AMID TEACHER BURNOUT, MORE STUDENT NEEDS

Though enrollment has decreased, educators’ workload hasn’t, said Johnson, who is a parttime music production and computer science teacher at Keithley Middle School.

Student behaviors have changed since 2019, and their social-emotional needs are higher, Johnson said.

Because of a lack of substitute teachers and inconsistent substitute teacher policies in the district, teachers are covering each other’s classrooms during their planning periods, which not only is costing the district more money but is contributing to more teacher burnout, “which further exacerbates the absences for educators” and disrupts student learning, he said.

Most of the educators impacted by the cuts are classroom teachers, counseling staff, special-education classrooms and Limited English Proficient specialists, Johnson said.

“It’s also impacting school buildings where teachers are asked to voluntary transfer or involuntary transfer to ... which further exacerbates the issue and disrupts those student relationships that we built,” Johnson said. “Our students are very diverse, and they need those relationships in order to connect to the curriculum.”

The Franklin-Pierce County School District serves more than 60% of students of color, Johnson said.

Zylstra said the district shares Johnson’s concerns about staff workload and burnout and said the substitute teacher shortage is real. The budget cuts will hurt efforts the district has made to hire more Black, Indigenous and people of color in recent years, too, he said.

“We have a goal of better representing our community that we’re a part of, and unfortunately our newest educators are the most vulnerable to lose their roles,” Zylstra said. “That [hurts] a lot of our intentional efforts around recruiting and retaining BIPOC folks.”

Many of Johnson’s middle school students are rebuilding their social skills and feeling disconnected from their peers and the curriculum. They are struggling to feel a sense of belonging, empathize with their peers, see other perspectives and communicate their own emotions, which further emphasizes the need for more support in the classroom, Johnson said.

“My students don’t just say, ‘I don’t get this,’” he said. “They say, ‘I don’t know how to access this because something’s in the way. I need a counselor to support me, I need a social worker to support me, I need my coach to support me. I need a trusted adult to help me deal with the things that I’m dealing with in my personal life before I can access this education.’”

Sometimes students’ only trusted adult is at school, Johnson said. Laying off teachers means there are fewer, more competitive educator jobs in the area, which will continue to push people out of the education field and further exacerbate the educator shortage in the state, he said.

“I think that beyond class size, beyond the disruption to relationships, I think students are going to have to be able to cope with fewer resources,” Johnson said. “I think this is going to put more pressure on teachers and the community.”