Education Layoffs Begin at the Texas Education Agency

So it has begun. Texas has officially begun the process of shedding itself of thousands of taxpaying, home owning, goods and services consuming educators and associated support personnel at the state’s main campus – you could call it: the Texas Education Agency’s main office in Austin at the downtown William B. Travis Building.

The TEA has a total of 1058 employees, most of them right there in that building. While they aren’t revealing numbers, my guess is that this purge will end up being in the hundreds.

But the thing that really gets to me is that this isn’t a layoff cycle reflecting Perry’s belt-tightening request to cut 7.5% in expenses for the current fiscal year. These layoffs are “anticipatory” in nature.

That is, they anticipate that they aren’t going to have money to pay a bunch of state employees next year so the TEA is going ahead and letting them go now.

And my guess is that they won’t be laying off any of those big ticket employees at the top of the pay scale. They won’t, for instance, be laying off Debbie Ratcliffe, the TEA spokesperson who announced the layoffs. Ratcliffe pulls down over 100 large at her job.

And I doubt that Carlos Vientemillas, the TEA’s portfolio manager will get the axe. He pulls down the biggest check in the agency. He makes more than the governor.

They could probably lay off all the people that are concerned with school textbooks and making sure that the recently revised standards in ELA, science and social studies are reflected in them so that they will support the new end of course exams that will begin next year.

And I only say this since Texas hasn’t any money to buy textbooks.

That would make sense, I guess.