If you are a teacher/educator/administrator in the WSFCS system, you know that emails began to be sent to people identified in the “Reduction In Force” currently in its latest stage. What’s so egregious about this round is its timing: when it happened and how fast it was announced and then implemented.

Not even EIGHT school days into the new year and schools were having to brace for another round of unexpected cuts in staff.

As explained in what is becoming a regular stress alert in the form of an email:

And if you want a crash-course of what RIF is in this school system, you can always go here:

Those words “fair, equitable, and orderly” are not the first that come to mind when reflecting on the manner and pace at which this whole financial debacle has occurred.

What many may not understand in this process is that administration are treated differently than teachers. While an assistant principal (AP) may be RIF’ed, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the position has been eliminated (although some schools lost an AP position in the first rounds of layoffs). If the position remains, then those who have been displaced will begin to fill those positions based on a “ring of service.”

However, not every AP who is RIF’ed will have a position to go to as some AP roles will be eliminated all together.

What has happened in my school is that one AP role was eliminated all together over the summer. While that AP was able to fill a vacant job elsewhere in the county, his position at my school no longer exists. We went from four APs to three.

Now two of those three current APs were RIF’ed over this weekend. Their futures are uncertain and the people who will fill their positions at my school will come from other schools based on seniority and service records if both positions remain.

What that means is that the shifting of people in leadership roles at schools will be rather frequent and rapid creating a domino effect of uncertainty. And the fact that some APs will not be able to stay in the school system is not the only travesty in a state that supposedly is NUMBER #1 IN THE COUNTRY FOR BUSINESSES.

It’s the relationships that will be fractured in schools and the hemorrhaging of the leadership pipeline in this county.

Great administrators are those who have built up over time relationships with the students, staff, and community. There is no other position in a public school that requires as much ability for positive outreach than an administrator. Most all of the discipline, professional development, budgeting, and management of all the minutiae that makes a school function is under the domain of assistant principals.

Students and teachers do not look at an AP and see a job; they see a person with whom a working relationship exists – one that is even more important now in these unstable times in WSFCS. Those relationships are now severed.

Also, please keep in mind that great principals were usually great assistant principals and the way that this state has treated principals these last 12 years isn’t that… well… great. Actually, we are lucky that there are people who still wish to become principals in NC public schools. What WSFCS is doing right now is punishing promising younger APs who desire to become great principals in THIS SCHOOL SYSTEM by not being able to keep them through no fault of their own.

That could create a leadership deficit in this school system that could last for YEARS because the financial outlook and the governing of the school system will not be drawing candidates from other places.

And then think of all of those students in the school here who may have the ambition and desire to be teachers and educators. At least three universities send student teachers to our schools on a yearly basis and look what we are showing them about a possible future here in WSFCS.