The amount of teachers in the Coast Mountains School District (CMSD) who received layoff notices this year is down substantially from last year, with 27 teachers receiving notice compared to last year's nearly 50.
That's because estimates indicate the district is only going to lose about 30 students in the coming school year, whereas last year that number was closer to 100, said school board chair Art Erasmus.
“We are heading in a better direction than we did last year,” he said.
And this might be the new normal – at least for the next few years. Erasmus said the district's long-term projections show that by 2016 the enrolment decline will have stopped.
“We may be seeing an incline,” he said, of the district's make up after 2016. “Part of what we presently experience is that the number of kindergarten kids that come into the school is smaller than the number of kids that graduate in Grade 12, so that arithmetic tells you that we are shrinking.
“But when the bulge of the large classes will have graduated, and the number of kids that graduate and the number of kids coming to kindergarten are approximately equal, then we're not going to have a decline.”
And he noted that this year's student estimates present a different staffing challenge – when bits and pieces of the population leave a school, than it's not one teacher or one job less in the school, but a fraction of a position that needs to be cut or filled.
It's yet to be determined how many of those layoff notices will be rescinded – each year layoff notices are issued to teachers, with a portion of those rehired by September depending on job postings and seniority. Erasmus said those numbers will be available by the end of August.
And although last year saw a higher number of teacher's retiring than usual, which offset the high number of layoff notices, this year that does not appear to be the case, with only half a dozen teacher's giving notice of retirement to date.