The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District laid off dozens of pool, theater and library employees last week. The district says it hopes to rehire employees once outstanding budget questions get answered. But some say the layoffs took employees by surprise and have cast their futures – and summer operations – into limbo.
Susanna Litwiniak heads the union that represents the school district’s classified employees, like secretaries and cafeteria workers. She says the nonretention letters came as a shock.
“It was completely unexpected by myself and everybody who got these notices,” she said.
The letters were sent to three groups: library aides, pool managers and theater technicians. All together, that’s about 30 employees, more than half of whom are library aides.
They are the latest group of employees to face termination. The district has already cut elementary school counselors, student support liaisons and employees who help run the district’s gifted and talented program. And the district is eliminating two positions from its central office.
In a Wednesday press release, Assistant Superintendent Kari Dendurent said the layoffs are not reflective of employee performance, but rather uncertainty around school funding. The district started the current budget cycle with a $17 million deficit and has implemented across-the-board cuts to fill in the hole.
The employees who received layoff notices were on the chopping block this budget cycle. But Litwiniak says the timing of the notices was unexpected. School board members met last week and will reconvene June 26 for a special finance committee meeting.
“I think we were all under the impression that we were in a holding pattern, waiting to see what the governor would do on the 19th so this was kind of preemptive,” she said.
June 19th was Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s deadline to veto parts of the state budget. This session, state lawmakers passed a $700 increase to the base amount of money school districts get per student. And they overrode Dunleavy’s veto of the bill. But the governor has the power to slice the money that funds it. And on Thursday evening, he did.
Superintendent Clayton Holland on Thursday agreed the timing of the notices wasn’t ideal. He’d originally planned to decide on the positions at the special finance committee meeting later this month. But he says the district’s Human Resources Department was concerned about laying people off four days before their health insurance ends.
“We've gone through these processes before and have been saved by late funding, and now here we are, you know, going later than ever with all this uncertainty, that, like I said, our HR department felt they couldn't meet the required deadlines.”
Now that Dunleavy has announced his vetoes, board members will reevaluate the implemented cuts. The district hopes to bring cut positions back. But Litwiniak says some employees are tired of the back-and-forth.
“People are done with it,” she said. “They'd rather just know: ‘Do I have a job, or don't I?’ So that they can then plan their lives accordingly.”
Beyond the employees who got letters last week, Litwiniak says the future is murky for all of the district’s nearly 500 classified staff. Those employees’ collective bargaining agreement says the district is supposed to decide before the end of the school year whether a classified employee will keep their job. As of Thursday, that decision hasn’t happened.
“Every classified staff at this point in time does not know whether they have a job next year,” she said.
Five of the district’s seven pool managers were laid off. The district’s also proposing to cut its districtwide pool supervisor position, which has been unfilled for the last two years. The district’s director of planning and operations, Kevin Lyon, has been filling in the role.
Pool managers are responsible for managing lifeguards and running pool operations. If those positions are eliminated, the pools can’t be open. But Kevin Lyon, the district’s director of planning and operations, said Thursday he and the district are working on potential solutions. Those include discussions with city parks and recreation staff and local service areas to find ways to keep pools open in communities.
Some of those communities are taking matters into their own hands. In Seldovia, for example, residents opted to pay more in property taxes and will put the revenue toward the operation of their community pool. And a group of Ninilchik residents is working to create a recreational service area to absorb the cost of running the pool at the K-12 school.
Holland, the superintendent, says school theaters won’t take on any new business over the summer, though those facilities tend to be less busy than pools between school years.
And he said no school libraries will fully close as a result of the layoffs. There are already libraries in the district that operate without a librarian, he said, and school board members have been clear that keeping libraries open is a priority. In the process of making inter-district transfers possible and honoring employee seniority, he said broad notices were necessary.
“My sincere hope is that we can work to reverse a lot of this,” Holland said. “I don’t – but we don’t know. We don’t know how far we can go on that or if we even can.”
Dunleavy’s Thursday evening vetoes include more than a quarter of the extra per-student funding state lawmakers approved this session. Kenai Peninsula School Board members approved a budget that assumed a $680 per-student increase. Lawmakers approved $700 per-student. Dunleavy’s veto results in a roughly $500 per-student increase.
