CINCINNATI — Cincinnati Public Schools voted on Wednesday to cut more than a dozen assistant principal and manager positions throughout the district in an effort to close its $31.6 million budget deficit.
That deficit was center stage at a May 20 meeting of the Board of Education, where board members determined job cuts would likely be necessary to close the funding gap.
Since then, the district's budget task force has chipped away at the deficit amount through analyzing the district's spending item by item. On Wednesday, district officials announced they'd been able to reduce the deficit from $31.6 million to $13.6 million.
During the meeting, school board members said job reductions of both custodial staff and administrators contributed to the deficit reduction, but money was also recovered through other means, like reducing resources as a result of lowered student enrollment, higher TIF funding amounts than projected and re-allocating Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds to pay for needed IT costs.
Still, one item unexpectedly increased in cost in just one day: transportation costs.
In just one day, CPS' costs for transportation increased by $6.7 million, though district officials are still working to determine why that happened. Costs associated with transporting students to and from school have gone up year-over-year for the last 20 years, Board President Eve Bolton said, but a $6.7 million jump at once was unusual.
In part, that rising cost comes down to four factors, school board officials said:
- An increase in the cost of fuel for buses
- An increase in services provided for students who require curb-to-curb transportation
- An increase in costs for monitors for students with challenges that mean they can't ride the bus alone
- A 3% year-to-year increase written into transportation contracts
Still, the school board was faced with voting on Interim Superintendent Shauna Murphy's list of recommendations for balancing the district's budget. Those recommendations include not re-employing 12 assistant principals and two management positions.
Many of those assistant principal roles — called Assistant Principal of Culture & Community — were created using ESSER funds, or payments from the federal government for schools during COVID. The funds were intended to combat learning challenges during the pandemic, but were always intended to expire; board members said ESSER funds were only meant to sustain the assistant principal roles for one year.
However, one role cut — that of an ESL Manager — is a role many in public comment voiced their support for maintaining.
Teachers, parents and professionals within the district used time during public comment to express concern about cutting the role they said is crucial to students within CPS learning English as their second language.
According to one speaker, English learning students are the fastest growing population within the district.
"Eliminating the ESL manager position is a bad decision that will jump start a chain reaction of inequity," said one speaker who was identified only as Dana.
She went on to say that CPS serves over 5,600 multilingual language learners — roughly 16% of the entire CPS student body.
Still, the board voted to cut the positions highlighted in the superintendent's recommendations, though board member Mike Morowski expressed support for re-visiting the ELS manager role in the future, once the budget deficit issue has been resolved.
"These are never easy conversations or easy decisions," said board member Brandon Craig.
Board officials also said services for ELL students will continue, but the programming may look differently than it currently does because of the cut ESL manager role.
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