When it comes to the state of the workers in the field of public education it is fair to say that things have been going badly in many places around the world. It seems like as costs rise and budgets shrink at all levels of government an increasing number of educators are fining themselves facing the axe instead of facing the prospect of getting ready for the coming school year. While these cuts seem to have come to schools all across the nation, sparing few if any of the school districts in the nation, some schools have been hit worse than others.

Today we are going to be looking at the situation in the Brockton School District, which is located in the town of Brockton, MA. In this town the administration of the school board has decided that they are going to give layoff notices to 100 of their teachers in order to make ends meet. The layoff notices, which were issues on Tuesday, are all being given to classroom educators in an attempt to shore up a fairly large hole in the budget for the coming school year. The budget is currently projected to have a shortfall of about $7.8 million that must be cut before the new school year can begin.

While 100 layoff notices were sent out to the teachers the school district is not sure that they are actually going to have to cut back on quite that many teachers in order to fix their budgetary gap. The school district is just being cautious. In order to be in compliance with both state laws and the agreement that has been set out in the contract agreed upon with the union for the teachers the layoff notices had to go into effect by the 15^th of May in order to be valid for the coming year of school. To that end the school is sending out notices to all of the jobs that they might need to cut under the worst-case scenario. If the school can find ways to cut the budget without cutting all of the staffers then some of the layoff notices may be rescinded and a portion of the jobs can be spared.

The problem is that even if the school only cuts half of the jobs it will be enough to qualify as a mass layoff action. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea here is a look at how the federal government defines a mass layoff, “actions that result in workers being separated from their jobs. Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.” These kinds of layoffs get special warning in order to give workers, and the surrounding community, to have some time to make plans for the loss of the income, as mass layoffs have been shown to have a ripple effect in the surrounding communities.