We are likely on a crash course for substantial teacher layoffs when Town Meeting votes on the 2021-22 schools’ budget and one metric considered is total personnel dollars per student.

That is not the only relevant metric, but it is an invariable focus.

Fewer students means, in the eyes of budget traditionalists, that we need fewer teachers and therefore should spend less on total teacher compensation.

This is a basic reality for every municipality in the country.

There will of course be arguments in May 2021 such as, “But most of the families who left the district this year are going to return in Sep 2021!”

But we won’t have certainty about that in May 2021, so many Town Meeting members will say, “We should base the budget on what we know now.”

Due to layoff rules under collective bargaining agreements, the least-tenured will be the first laid off. “Last hired, first fired.”

And given Brookline’s trend of diversity hiring of classroom teachers (Unit A) — being somewhat more successful at it more recently then earlier — layoffs will affect BIPOC educators disproportionately, because they are, collectively, more junior than white teachers.

Being insufficiently successful at hiring classroom teachers of color, Brookline has prioritized hiring of administrators of color, which gives better headline % numbers on diversity hiring reports because there are far fewer total administrators than classroom teachers.

So the % reporting of diversity hiring for the “administrators” group looks high in PowerPoint-friendly manner because Brookline has a very small number of  administrators relative to our total PSB staffing, which is way more than 1,000 personnel.

But the importance of classroom BIPOC teachers (Unit A) to BIPOC students has been most powerfully explained in the Pulitzer-quality essay, Black Man in Front, by BHS teacher Malcolm Cawthorne, which begins, “I left Brookline.  I went to Louisiana where I knew no one.  It was an odyssey to find the experience I never had in Brookline Public Schools.  I had great teachers but I was not satisfied!  I was looking for the Black Man in Front. I struggled not seeing ‘me’ in front of my classrooms!  I had phenomenal teachers, but none looked like me.”

PSB enrollment will be down this year, we just don’t yet know by how much.

Meanwhile, there will also be substantial, new non-personnel expenses for public health compliance, putting yet more pressure on the budget line items for total teacher compensation in May 2021.

What can school advocates do about all this?

1. We must ensure, collectively, that students have the best possible experience this year within the unfortunate realities and constraints of our situation.
   
2. This means parents, administrators, School Committee members, and educators (Unit A, Unit B, Paras, and union leadership) must all work harder than we might want to, do things we might not want to do, and accept that nothing about the situation is going to be perfect for anyone.
   
3. The PSB, under Dr. James Marini’s leadership, should develop and issue a parent survey in the spring of 2021 asking about families’ *likely* intentions and plans for enrollment in the 2021-22 school year.  This must be completed and shared publicly before the Town budget process, so that Town Meeting will have a better-than-usual, though of course still imperfect, sense of fall 2021 enrollment.

Everyone is going to have to step up and, to some extent, change their tune.

As of now our PSB community orchestra is massively discordant, with the loudest, sharpest clash being between BEU leadership and PSB parents.

“Everyone” must include both engaged parents and union leadership.

Without mutual support of those two groups, the May 2021 school budget process will be more of a disaster than necessary, resulting in more BIPOC teacher layoffs than necessary.

All the leaders and insiders know all of the above, but it is an inconvenient political truth, so denying it or ignoring it is easier than being open and real about it.

All PSB community members need to come together now to ensure informed community support and engagement for achieving the best outcome for our schools in a world of really bad possibilities.