Most Dane County school districts avoid teacher layoffs

Matthew DeFour:

Most Dane County school districts expect to balance their 2012-13 budgets without teacher layoffs, superintendents said Tuesday.

Instead, to offset stricter-than-usual funding limits set by the state, districts are cutting positions through attrition, reducing benefits and tapping reserves.

Some are also working with employees to identify savings through new work rules being developed to replace collective bargaining agreements, most of which expire June 30.

The layoff issue is being closely watched statewide as state budget cuts to education play a role in Gov. Scott Walker's upcoming recall election.

In a State Journal survey of Dane County's 16 main school districts, Monona Grove reported issuing notices to one full-time and seven part-time employees, and Mount Horeb said it issued one layoff notice.

Related: Real Data: How Act 10 Affected the Sun Prairie Area School District by sp-eye:

Act 10 was designed to provide school district and municipalities with "tools"....tools which could be used to lower property taxes and get a handle on exploding costs.

How did it work?
Well...we look at DPT salary and fringe benefit data available from DPI and compared apples to apples. We looked at actual employees in both administration and teaching (support staff salary data is not available). We looked at employees that were on staff both in 2010-11 and this year (2011-12).

We broke teachers down in to 3 classes: the top shelf (most highly paid), those with salaries right in the middle, and those on the bottom rung. Further, we initially obtained data on 32 individuals in each class, to make for a representative statistical sampling.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 6, 2012 7:54 PM
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