Furloughs, pay cuts for teachers urged as option Under law, layoffs are now the only way to deal with funding shortfalls

AUSTIN — School districts should be allowed to give teachers unpaid furloughs and cut their salaries to help deal with a funding shortfall that one estimate says could cost 100,000 jobs, a leading state senator says. State Senate Education Committee Chairman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, said the layoff projection could be whittled if school districts could take less drastic steps, an area she said loosening state restrictions could help temper the effects of a budget shortfall. Under starting-point state budget proposals filed by legislative leaders, school districts would get $9.3 billion to $9.8 billion less through the next two years than under current funding formulas to cover enrollment increases and a projected drop in local revenue due to lower property values. One expert has estimated the higher figure could cost up to 100,000 school district jobs in Texas through the next two years. “One of those burdens that we have placed on our school districts is that they cannot decrease your salary. They can’t have furlough days. It’s not allowed in the law. The only option is to fire,” said Shapiro. “We need to give them the ability to lower teacher salaries.” Shapiro said she hopes to have a committee meeting “the very first thing out of the box” on so-called unfunded mandates, such as the salary issue. “The last thing we want to do is put people on the unemployment rolls,” she said. “So we’ve got to make sure that that particular part of the law is erased.” One teacher group said the idea is another example of the state looking to go backward to close the funding gap.

180 instruction days

Under current law, the standard teacher contract is a minimum of 187 days, including 180 days of instruction and the rest for purposes such as professional development. A school district can reduce pay for noncontract workers — janitors and cafeteria workers, for example — and it can reduce teacher salaries from one year to the next if notice is given at least 45 days before the first day of instruction, Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe said. However, under a provision meant to safeguard a state salary increase, teachers and several other classes of employees who work for a school district in the 2010-2011 school year cannot get a salary cut if they stay with the same school district.

Furlough flexibility

Superintendents are pushing for flexibility that would allow them to furlough employees, if necessary, on non-instructional days. “It’s something that superintendents are looking for flexibility on,” said Jenny Caputo, spokeswoman for the Texas Association of School Administrators. “Certainly nobody wants to furlough employees,” Caputo said, calling furloughs a lesser evil than layoffs or eliminating positions. “With the Legislature looking at cutting HISD’s annual budget by as much as $348 million, we’d appreciate any flexibility they could give us in achieving those significant cuts,” said Houston Independent School District spokesman Jason Spencer. “These would be the most drastic cuts to Texas education since World War II.” John Folks, past president of the Texas Association of School Administrators and superintendent of Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, said if his district furloughed administrators and other employees — as it can under current law — that would save $700,000 a day. Adding teachers, counselors, librarians and nurses to the mix would bring the savings to $2.5 million a day. “Furloughs would be one of the last things I would want to do,” he said. With furloughs, however, “Everybody shares in the pain, and we’re preserving jobs.”

‘The wrong direction’

Richard Kouri, a Texas State Teachers Association spokesman, said his group is split on the issue of furloughs and salary decreases. It does not want to limit options to deal with the funding crisis but believes the state should be increasing professional development days and “getting our salaries out of the bottom third in the country” to recruit and retain the best, he said. “If we’re going to look at a long list of things that are bad options that are going to take public education in Texas the wrong direction instead of the right direction,” he said, “they might as well be on the list of things that are going to take us in the wrong direction.”

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