However, not nearly that many teachers actually will lose their jobs next year, said district Superintendent Don Brannam, who also will propose a 15.5 percent cut to his own pay in order to bridge an expected $450,000 budget shortfall. He said the notifications will give the district the flexibility to bridge the budget shortfall.
He said that the board and administration will work through July to determine what might be cut, which will determine which teachers will stay.
The deadline to finish the small school district’s budget is Aug. 1.
“Many of those teachers will know way before then as we plan,” Brannam said.
He also said that the Griffin contract language also seemed to necessitate the extent of the notifications, which were delivered to the shortest-tenured teachers.
The Griffin district operates a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school on Steamboat Island with about 650 students. Griffin’s shortfall is about 6 percent of its annual budget. High school students are bused to Capital High School in Olympia.
Teachers throughout the state are receiving layoff notices this week. There is a state-mandated deadline that districts inform employees with teaching certificates of possible layoffs by Friday. The state budget shortfall has resulted in cuts to the local school districts’ budgets, which are provided mostly by state money.
The Tumwater district announced this week that 30 employees with teaching certification, including two administrators, will receive layoff notices. North Thurston avoided layoffs for teachers this year, as did Olympia, although the latter district prepared for the equivalent of 37.5 full-time teachers.
Brannam said the district hopes to keep the school’s format of three classes in each of its grade levels, and administrators expect to start a new classroom program in the fall for students and families who want a more individually guided school program.
That new program would allow students to study subjects at their own pace but would provide collaborative projects with classmates, who might be in different grade levels.
Brannam said such a program would give the school the ability to adjust to the fluctuation of students coming into the district. He said he would expect one class of 20 to 30 students in such a program by fall.
“We have to learn to do it with our current resources. We are a small district and we’re not going to get a lot of those stimulus dollars, and anyway, they’d go away in a year,” he said.
“We have to do it with our own ingenuity and resources with the people we have got here.”
Venice Buhain covers education for The Olympian. She can be reached at 360-754-5445 or vbuhain@theolympian.com.
