Education

Budget Woes: How Will Teachers Fare?

By Vaishali Honawar — September 25, 2008 1 min read
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The Dallas Morning News has a story this morning about the district wanting to use $18 million of Title I money to pay the salaries of 300 teachers. The district, apparently, has a shortfall of $84 million in its budget.

But this is not sitting well with the state education department, which says that federal money cannot be spent on making up for local budget cuts. And that, state officials say, is in effect what Dallas plans to do.

The imbroglio in Dallas does make one wonder about how states and school districts will cope with budget woes in a dramatically uncertain economy, and how this will affect teachers.

Just this week, there was a story in the Baltimore Sun that Gov. Martin O’Malley, burdened by a $432 million budget shortfall, is considering shifting the cost of $622 million in teachers’ pensions to Maryland school districts which, in turn, are screaming about their own money woes.

No doubt we’ll be hearing more such stories in the weeks to come.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Teacher Beat blog.