Livin' is uneasy

Summer turns into a time of anxiety for schoolteachers as districts look to cut costs

(Globe Correspondent / Lisa Poole) Julia Norman, who recently lost her teaching job in Sudbury, fills out last-minute paperwork before leaving her Waltham home for an interview. She has sent out 83 resumes.

The annual New Hampshire camping trip that used to be 14 days is now down to five, and there won't be any side trips to theme parks for Westborough teacher Deborah Harvell and her two teenage daughters.

Like many public school teachers in Boston's western suburbs, Harvell - who said she also has doubled her normal summer tutoring workload - said she is economizing and taking on extra work this summer in the face of uncertain times. Her family used to eat out once a week; now, it's once a month. Car trips are kept to a minimum, and it will be nature hikes instead of ATV rentals when they head north for their abbreviated summer getaway.

"Typically, I work the summer so that we can have a summer vacation," said Harvell, a 42-year-old speech therapy specialist. "This year, I'm doing it just to pay the bills."

It wasn't supposed to be this way. After the rigors of the school year, the period from late June through early September is traditionally a time for teachers to relax, regroup, and recharge their batteries. For many, the blissful period is what attracted them to the job in the first place.

Yet after a spring marked by rising gasoline and food prices, voter rejections of Proposition 2 1/2 property tax limit overrides, shrinking revenues, and municipal regrouping, some teachers say this has become the summer of their discontent.

More of their colleagues are now working over the summer months to help make ends meet, while others are simply worrying more - about bigger class sizes, scarcer resources, and even whether they will have a job at all.

"A lot of people are working second and third jobs instead of taking a class or going for their certificate," said Chandler Creedon Jr., president of the Franklin Education Association.

Even though many school systems are still seeing nominal increases in their budgets, administrators say that hikes in fixed costs such as healthcare premiums, energy, and negotiated raises in existing teachers' union contracts have more than eaten up any additional funds and are making cuts necessary.

Teacher cuts and downsizing stretch across the suburbs west of Boston. In all, a Globe West survey found 11 districts that made cuts totaling about 175 staff positions, including more than 100 teaching jobs, for the coming school year.

Some towns, such as Watertown, were able to absorb staffing cuts through retirements without resorting to layoffs, but remaining teachers will still face larger classes.

Other school systems aren't as lucky. In Newton, where voters rejected a $12 million override in May, school administrators say that as many as 60 positions will be cut by the time students return to class in early September. These include 21 elementary-school teaching positions, 17 teaching jobs at the middle schools and high schools, and the rest being professional staff such as music instructors and guidance counselors.

Officials were able to cover only about half the cuts through retirement and other attrition, meaning about 30 people have been notified they will not have a job in the fall.

In Franklin, voters rejected an override earlier this year, prompting town officials to cut 45.5 teaching positions.

For those who were cut, Creedon said, there is the stress of finding a new job. For those who weren't, he said, there is the worry: What will school look like when they return in the fall?

"There is a lot of anxiety right now," he said. "We are going back to the dark ages, to classrooms of 28 or 30 students. People are saying to themselves 'I'm a good teacher and I've done really well, but if I'm faced with a classroom of 30 students, how am I going to deal with it?' Even some of the veteran teachers are having trouble with it."

Sudbury cut 22 staff positions, resulting in layoffs for 13 full- or part-time teachers, after officials asked voters for either a $2.8 million override or a $1.8 million override, and both were rejected.

One of those let go was Julia Norman, a fifth-grade teacher at the Israel Loring Elementary School, who took a gamble with her future two years ago and is now wondering exactly how much it's going to cost her.

During the 2005-06 school year, Norman was a 29-year-old science teacher in the Waltham schools, and at a career crossroads. With seven years of experience, she had achieved professional status in Waltham, which meant that it would have been highly unlikely that she would ever be laid off.

Yet her dream was to teach a full elementary school class of her own, getting to work with the same students for an entire day across a variety of subjects. So she traded job security for a chance to teach fifth-graders in Sudbury.

"I left to follow my heart and do what I really wanted to do," she said during a recent interview. "I knew it was a gamble, but [Sudbury] seemed like a pretty secure place."

Norman found out quickly that even Sudbury can be a rough place for teachers.

In her first year there, town officials asked voters for a $2.5 million override - costing the owner of an average home in Sudbury an extra $403 per year in property taxes - to help avoid education cuts.

The measure was approved, but anxiety grew among the town's teachers, she said, when local officials said they would go back to voters for another override the second year in a row.

Not long after this year's override failed on June 10, Norman received a notice telling her that as a teacher with only two years in the system, she was being laid off.

Since then, she has sent out 83 resumes to various school districts, but as of last week, she had yet to find work.

Kelly Finneran, the president of the Shrewsbury Education Association, said the uncertain job market for teachers may actually come with a small silver lining - giving school districts a better chance to hang on to their most promising young teachers.

Younger teachers tend to be highly mobile, she said, but these days, many are probably thinking twice about making a move and losing what tenure they've been able to accumulate.

Less-experienced teachers also may have an advantage in the tight education job market, since they cost less to employ.

Norman said she is afraid her level of experience may be hampering her job search.

"I have been going on a lot of interviews with a lot of districts, and one of my greatest fears is that . . . for a district that is having financial problems, it's cheaper to hire someone younger than I am," she said. "Is it a blessing or a curse? I have all this experience and I wonder if it's going to cost me in the end.

"I just keep telling myself that a lot of things happen over the summer - people find other jobs, they retire - but it's definitely a crunch right now for teachers looking for work, myself included," Norman said. "Being unemployed this summer . . . it's just very scary with the economy the way it is right now."