When it comes to job cuts to education there has been no shortfall of districts looking to cut back on their staff as a way to make ends meet. Today the cuts are coming from the Battle Creek Public Schools as they are getting ready to get rid of some of their educators in order to fill in a sizable budget gap.  The city of Battle Creek Schools have made $2.5 million in cuts to their budget in order to make ends meet. In order to make those cuts the schools are going to cut back on 26 in classroom teachers, as well as a number of other jobs. The cuts to classroom teachers include 3 elementary school teachers, 10 middle school teachers and 3 high school teachers. There will also be cuts to the administrative system and assistants.

Of course these cuts will not be enough to make up for the $5 million in cuts that will need to be made in order to set the budget to right. Another $686,000 will come from having the schools cuts its Bearcat Alternative Program, an alternative education program for students who have not done well in the traditional education system. As this program only has about 170 students in the program this loss would not impact a large number of students. For now the rest of the cuts are yet to be decided upon, and the school will have some hard choices to make if it wants to get up to speed on the budget for the coming school year.

Of course, many school districts have been having to make tough cuts in order to make ends meet and keep within the bounds of their budgets. For example the schools in the city of Peoria recently cut more than 200 workers in order to fix its budget. For those of you who missed out on the coverage here is an excerpt that will get you up to speed in no time at all:

“Working in the field of public education was, for many years, a stable profession. One in which after the first three years you were pretty much guaranteed to have a job for the rest of your life. In the recent economy that has made that dream of stability in the name of public service a thing of the past. As many schools look to make cuts there are many teachers who are looking to find out if they are going to be out of a job during the next school year.
Well it looks like the newest district to solve its fiscal issues by cutting teachers is the Peoria School District. The members of the board of the Peoria School District have decided to cut back on about 258 workers. Of those 258 workers about 53 are going to be in  classroom educators. They are also going to cut back on 16 of their probationary teachers for reasons that are being dubbed as “poor performance”.
That  having been said, we have an interesting amount of data about the types of jobs that are going to be cut from the rosters. Here is a look at the jobs that are expected to be cut, though right now exactly which ones are going to be gone:

• Full time teachers: 53
• Part-time teachers: 100
• Probationary teachers: 16
• Attrition cuts by not renewing the contracts of support employees: 105”