In April, Cleveland schools laid off over 400 employees, including hundreds of teachers and classroom aides. Since then, nearly 130 have been recalled to jobs at the Cleveland Metropolitan School District – including about 30 teachers the district began notifying on Friday.
CMSD is expected to recall those teachers into full time teaching positions, Errol Savage, president of the Cleveland Teachers Union, said. Out of the 114 paraprofessionals who were laid off by the district, 97 have been offered positions, Darrielle Snipes, a spokesperson for the district, told Signal Cleveland.
The recalls are on top of an agreement that brought back 60 teachers as long-term building substitute teachers for a full year. That was part of an agreement signed in May between the district and the union.
“CMSD did work hard and creatively in re-allocating resources to bring these people back,” Savage told Signal Cleveland. He attributed much of the district’s willingness to get creative to the public pressure and protests following the layoff announcement.
Even with the recalled employees, CMSD anticipates starting the upcoming school year with around 650 fewer employees than it had at the start of this past school year.
How do recalls work?
When the district cuts jobs and then finds itself with open positions because employees who were not laid off choose to resign or retire, it must first fill those openings with laid off employees according to the union contract. That’s where the recall list comes in.
The list, which is drawn up as part of the layoff process, sets the order in which teachers and paraprofessionals are re-offered a job in the district. The recall process is separate for different job categories and licensures, and the list roughly goes in reverse order of layoffs, so staff with the highest evaluation ratings and seniority get offered jobs first.
‘At least I have a job’
Not all educators who were called back are going back to CMSD — of the 97 paraprofessionals who got a call back, around 60 accepted the offer, Snipes told Signal Cleveland.
The vast majority of laid off paraprofessionals filled one of these roles: planning center instructional aides, who help students assigned to the calm-down spaces known as planning centers; college and career coordinators; or in-classroom aides for students with special education needs.
In general, former planning center aides and college coordinators have been asked to return as classroom aides, who work one-on-one with special education students, said Famika Bonner, who represents paraprofessionals on the CTU board. That’s partly because the district eliminated the college career coordinator position entirely.
For the most part, planning center aides and college and career coordinators who take jobs in the classroom will not take a pay cut because of an agreement signed between the district and the union in March.
But even with comparable pay, some paraprofessionals are apprehensive about heading back to the classroom.
Alicia Dodson, a college and career coordinator who vocally protested the layoffs, was recalled before the end of the school year. She got a phone call from human resources telling her there was a position at Sunbeam School as an aide for middle school students with a variety of special education needs.
Dodson wasn’t sure about the fit of the job; working as a classroom aide can be intense and Dodson was already feeling burned out after a year of upheaval. But she knew if she didn’t take it, her chances of finding another role at CMSD were slim.
“I felt like I didn’t really have an option,” she said. “I had to just accept whatever they threw out.”
Still, Dodson has had the chance to meet the teacher and some of the students she’ll be working with. In the past, she’s had really close relationships with the teachers she’s worked with and hopes to forge a similar partnership with the teacher at Sunbeam.
But the turmoil of the last year still weighs on her.
“I do have a very high level of anxiety around it,” she said. “But at least I have a job.”
