When it comes to jobs in education there are two schools of thought, the old school of thought and the new school of thought. In the old school a job in public education was a job for life. After all teachers, and many other workers, in the public school system enjoy the benefits of a strong union and protections to their jobs built into their contracts. They also enjoy the protection of working for a government instead of a company, and that means that their futures were less worried about the uncertain problems of quarterly profits and the collective will of the shareholders who are looking to turn their own profit on the company’s operations.

Then there is the new school of though, the one where public school workers are no longer safe from the whims of the world of budget. A world where the cost of everything is going up and the amount of money from taxes is going down. It is a world where many workers in public schools find that they are being put out of a job in the name of the bottom line.

Today we are going to talk about layoffs being made to workers in the Dallas Independent School District. The Dallas Independent School District sent out layoff notices, late last week to what are being called dozens of employees.

For the moment there is not a set number of jobs lost, but it may be enough to qualify as a mass layoff action. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term,  “The Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program collects reports on mass layoff actions that result in workers being separated from their jobs. Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.” Of course the Dallas Independent School District is familiar with the idea of mass layoffs. Some of you may recall that back in February the school was getting ready to layoff up to 4,000 workers in order to fix its budget.