Menino announces 565 city job cuts

Educators and students alike said Boston students’ education is at risk if cuts by Mayor Thomas Menino are approved by Boston City Council.

Menino proposed a budget for fiscal year 2010 that would cut 565 city workers’ jobs, including 212 teachers. City Council’s deadline to pass the budget proposed on Wednesday is July 1.

‘The mayor said a number of times if the teacher’s union were to agree to a wage freeze, we’d be able to retain all those 212 teachers that are proposed to be laid off right now,’ Menino spokesman Nick Martin said.

The city has reduced budget cuts since January because it received money from the economic stimulus plan, ‘but given the difficult economy, it was impossible not to have any layoffs at all,’ Martin said.

The Boston Teachers Union refuses to accept wage freezes because City Hall has not given specifics on how many jobs would be saved by a freeze, BTU Political Director Patricia Armstrong said.

The number of teaching jobs saved by accepting wage freezes has fluctuated over the past several months from approximately 350 to 900 to 100 to 26 to 212, Armstrong said.

‘Until we really know what the dollar amount is that’s available, we’re not interested in having any kind of discussion,’ she said.

Although the city will cut 212 teachers from public schools, it will bring in inexperienced people from groups such as Teach for America to fill the void, Armstrong said.

‘[Teach for America teachers] get a five-week training program, and they get paid the same as first-year teachers,’ she said. ‘If we have people out in the streets due to layoffs, and we get brand new kids out of college to come in, we have some issues there.’

BTU members voted for a request asking Boston Public Schools Department to discontinue its affiliation with Teach for America at the beginning of April, according to an April 3 Boston Globe article.

Laying off education professionals will ‘raise class size and eliminate support for kids who are struggling in schools,’ Boston University School of Education Dean Hardin Coleman said in an email.

‘Most principals will try to reduce the impact on the classroom by letting go of social workers and specialists,’ Coleman said. ‘It will negatively effect the traditionally underserved populations in our schools.’

Cutting teaching jobs will also decrease how many Boston students apply for college, Coleman said.

‘What we will lose are those kids who turn on to school later in their career and may need an extra boost to be college ready, particularly for a selective college like BU,’ Coleman said.

‘It is time to invest in education, not divest,’ he said.

Cutting teaching jobs is ‘nonsensical,’ College of Arts and Sciences freshman Elizabeth Ramirez said.

‘Cutting safety and education is not so useful for getting the city back on track,’ Ramirez said.

If Boston students receive a ‘lesser education,’ then they are less likely to aim for better jobs after completing it, Ramirez said.

‘Hitting education with budget cuts is not a good way to fix the economy,’ she said. ‘It’s a really good way to put us in a rut.’