Veteran teacher Anna Acosta shudders to think how Kelly High School students will react when they show up next month and find that a beloved dean is gone.
She suspects the dean’s layoff will especially hit the school’s recent immigrants who looked to her for support.
“She was extremely, extremely helpful in building bridges and also repairing harm, and she was well-respected,” said Acosta, who teaches history at the high school in Brighton Park on the Southwest Side. “I am sure my students are going to say, ‘Where’s Miss Montoya? We loved her.’”
And it’s not just one dean. Kelly also lost five teacher positions, plus two interventionists who helped struggling students. The result: Fewer classes will be offered and the remaining ones will have more students.
High schools like Kelly are being hit hard by budget cuts that district officials acknowledge will affect the student experience. When laying out the budget earlier this month, the district said it was cutting nearly 1,000 core instructional positions, which include English and math teachers, as well as art teachers.
But Chicago Public Schools only publicly released information on how exactly budget cuts are impacting individual schools on Monday — just days before Thursday’s budget vote and weeks later than it typically shares this information.
A WBEZ analysis of school-level budget changes shows that high schools with mostly Latino students are losing the most regular classroom teachers, both as a share of teachers and in overall positions. They lost 158 teachers, or 7% of their teachers.
Overall, there are about 4% fewer teachers across all schools, not including teachers who work specifically with students in special education. WBEZ analyzed teacher losses by type of school and student demographics.
Supt. Macquline King called the budget challenging and, as a former principal, she said it was hard for her to know that these cuts touch students. But she noted that principals, with their local school councils, make a lot of the decisions about who to lay off and who to keep.
“Those schools and those communities know what their children need most, and we’re relying on them to inform those budgets,” she said.
There’s two coinciding reasons Latino high schools experienced the deepest cuts. To close a massive budget deficit, the school district increased the number of students each teacher can take on. At the same time, many predominantly Latino high schools have seen their enrollments decrease.
Kelly’s enrollment dipped by about 100 students last school year.
Norma Rios-Sierra, a school board member who represents the Northwest Side, said she has heard from principals in her part of the city who are trying to figure out how to make their budgets work with the cuts. Her district’s only neighborhood high school, Roosevelt, is down eight teacher positions, according to CPS data.
She said those losses stem from enrollment decreases and an effort by the district to make sure that schools are equitably funded. When the district has limited resources it ends up pitting schools against each other, she said.
She worries that each staff loss is detrimental, and the stress put on schools “translates to the students’ experience.”
The school-level information also reveals that other programs and staff that weren’t discussed during initial budget presentations are being cut. There’s half as much money to pay for staff or organizations to put school safety plans in place.
Forty schools lost school assistants who, like at Kelly, often serve in the role of a dean, while two dozen schools lost their tech coordinator.
One Northwest side principal said her high school of more than 1,000 students now has just a part-time position for a tech coordinator. She said she had to eliminate her full-time tech coordinator along with six other positions. She did not want to be identified because CPS did not give her permission to be interviewed.
She and her staff had big plans for next school year, she said, but the cuts “took the wind out of their sails.”
Many schools are getting less discretionary funding that principals often use to pay for after-school programs or other staff like lunchroom monitors.
And more schools are having to use discretionary funds to pay for teachers or assistant principals, which also takes money away from other programs.
Kia Banks, the president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, said it is not right to make principals use their limited pots of discretionary funding to pay for positions that the district should provide. She was blindsided in the spring when the district announced it would no longer cover assistant principal positions at schools with smaller enrollments.
Banks points out that most of the displaced assistant principals are Black women who work in South and West side schools. She said the union is still negotiating with the district to try to win those positions back. She does not think the school board should pass the budget as is on Thursday because it lacks “the staffing and services our students need.”
WBEZ did not analyze school-level changes in special education teachers or aides. CPS budgeted for more special education staff this year than it did last year. However, the district adds special education staff as the school year goes on and there are now more students identified as having disabilities, as well as students with rising needs.
This summer, CPS laid off or eliminated vacancies for about 1,800 special education staff, but many of those positions will be added back as the school year goes on.