1 week Ago By Scott Travis
After years of dwindling enrollment, the Broward School District may finally be getting serious about shrinking.Both Superintendent Howard Hepburn and School Board member Allen Zeman say they are working on plans to “right-size” the district, which has seen a 30,000-student enrollment drop over the past decade and is expecting another loss of 8,800 students this fall. It could mean a funding cut of $79.
3 million.Zeman has been the board’s biggest advocate for closing schools, and he said he’ll continue that push.But he also plans to ask the School Board to consider other cost-saving measures, such as moving certified teachers now in administrative jobs, including some assistant principals, back to the classroom.
He said he also plans to propose reducing the number of high-level administrators in the district.Some of the budget-cutting proposals are unpopular with employee groups. Whether the School Board will agree with Zeman’s plan is unclear, but Superintendent Howard Hepburn acknowledged at a meeting Tuesday that some major cuts will be needed over the next year.
The district made an effort to shrink last year called “Redefining Broward Schools.” But it only resulted in a recommendation to close one school, Broward Estates Elementary in Lauderhill. The district has been able to avoid many cuts in recent years using federal COVID-19 relief dollars, which have now expired, and voter-approved referendum dollars, which are mostly allocated.
“We had enough money to keep staying in fantasy land in the budget,” Zeman told the Sun Sentinel. “But that wasn’t good budgetary decision-making.”Zeman said the School Board rejected some budget-cutting proposals he made in recent years, “so now it’s time to pay the piper.
” He said he’ll share a number of detailed proposals at an upcoming workshop.Hepburn said he’s also working on a budget-cutting plan, spokesman John Sullivan told the Sun Sentinel.“Superintendent Hepburn remains focused on Redefining Broward County Public Schools, a vision that includes aligning the District’s resources with student enrollment,” Sullivan said.
“Through strategic planning, the Superintendent will present the Board with a plan prioritizing the elimination of vacancies, identifying operational efficiencies, and leveraging attrition over the coming years to address foreseeable challenges.”So far, Hepburn has not announced any layoffs, despite a shocking slide shared at Tuesday’s meeting showing the number of employees over the past decades had actually increased, despite a loss of 30,000 students. Had the district downsized at the rate of enrollment declines, it would be down about 4,500, a district administrator told the School Board on Tuesday.
The upcoming school year is expected to be worse, with the state estimating the district’s enrollment, not counting charter schools, will drop 8,800 students, from 192,098 to 183,284.“One of the things that you look at when you have a dramatic decline in enrollment is did we also take the same reduction in overhead? And what you see in the budget is we have not,” Zeman told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “We still have five layers of management between the School Board and the principals of schools, so that’s at least one too many.
”Principals report to one of four area directors of teaching and learning. These directors report to four regional or assistant superintendents, whose boss is the deputy superintendent, a high-paying position that was created in 2022. The deputy superintendent reports to the superintendent, who reports to the School Board.
Zeman said he would like to eliminate the regional superintendents, as well as at least one high-level non-academic administrator position.He’s also proposing eliminating any teacher positions where teachers aren’t actually in the classroom. Zeman said there are about 300 to 600 teacher positions assigned to the district office.
These teachers often serve as liaisons to areas such as academics, student services and athletics.The district needs fewer assistant principals as well, Zeman said. The district has about 441 assistant principals, according to district employee lists.
That’s about the same as a decade ago when the district had 30,000 more students.“Someone will need to sit down and say, ‘You’ve been a fine assistant principal. .
.. But right now, I need you back in the classroom teaching physics next year.
Because we just have way too many assistant principals,” Zeman said.The steady number of assistant principals is largely related to a formula the district uses. It’s most dramatic at the middle school level, where every school gets one assistant principal each for sixth, seventh and eighth grades, regardless of size.
As a result, Falcon Cove Middle in Weston, which has 2,250 students, has three assistant principals, as does Pines Middle in Pembroke Pines, which has about 700 students.Hepburn acknowledged this was a problem at Tuesday’s meeting.“Those staffing allocation models do not make sense today,” he said.
“I know it’s an abrupt shift for the district so we’re not just going to shock the system” by immediately removing a lot of assistant principals all at once.Lisa Maxwell, executive director of the Broward Principals and Assistants Association, disputes the suggestion that the district has too many assistant principals. She said the numbers average out to about 1.
5 per school. She said assistant principals play a vital role in safety and security, including leading behavioral threat assessments for students who have indicated a desire to harm themselves or others.“Obviously if there’s not a need, then an assistant principal could be moved to another school where there is a need,” she said.
“But we’re the one group that runs very tight always. We’ve never been heavy in terms of total headcount.”The district also has about the same number of principals as a decade ago, since each school gets one, and there haven’t been any school closures.
Related ArticlesHow Broward schools got ‘out of whack’ — losing students while keeping employeesBroward schools chief could stay until 2030, under proposed extensionHow a Broward schools charter settlement ballooned to $120 millionOverall, the district has about 324 more employees than a year ago, despite its enrollment decline.The fastest-growing areas have been safety and security and mental health. That’s the result of the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland in 2018 and referendums in 2018 and 2022 that allocated millions to hire more security officers and mental health counselors.
The district has more than 625 campus security monitors, triple the number from 2015-16, and 250 security specialists, which is twice as many as a decade ago. The district also has 14 area security managers and about 90 armed guardians, positions that didn’t exist prior to Stoneman Douglas.The district has also created a new mental health services department in recent years with about 127 employees.
But not all areas have grown. District records suggest there are least 1,000 fewer teachers than a decade ago. For years, teachers have been funded based on the number of students, so if enrollment declines at a school, the number of teachers shrinks.
The district has avoided layoffs since there’s a high amount of voluntary turnover among teachers.“Every year teachers are reduced,” Anna Fusco, president of the Broward Teachers Union, told the Sun Sentinel. “If they want to cut the budget or if somebody retires or transfers out or quits, they might make a decision they’re not going to fill it and spread the work to other people.
That’s very common and not new.”Zeman said the district should have made similar decisions for administrators.“We haven’t had the courage to look at people who have been in the system for 15 or 20 years and say, “Look, as much as I love what you have done in the past being an administrator in the district, we can’t afford it anymore,'” Zeman said.
“But they were always perfectly willing to cut teachers.”The number of custodians also has decreased over the past decade, by about 300, according to district employee lists.That decline is a problem, said Dan Reynolds, president of the Federation of Public Employees, which represents the district’s service workers.
“Even though they’re losing students, they’re not losing buildings,” he said. “If you close a school or a building for low attendance, you still have to maintain that building or it gets full of mold, and paint starts peeling, and the roof starts leaking.”Reynolds said if the total number of employees has increased in recent years, it’s not due to his employees, which also include bus drivers, maintenance workers and food service workers.
“If you scratch the surface, you’re going to find that the explosion in employees is more from the middle management up than it is from the actual workers,” Reynolds said..
