The School City of Hammond closed the entire district Wednesday after most of its teachers called off to protest the School Board of Trustees’ Tuesday night vote to close three elementary schools and put 173 employees out-of-work.
Three hundred and six of SCH’s 685 teachers “chose not to come to work,” its spokeswoman, Donna Petraits, said in an email Wednesday. As a result, it wasn’t possible for the district to open with around only 40% of its teaching staff.
“The safety of our students is always our highest priority, and it was not possible to provide adequate supervision for our students. Canceling school for the day was our only option,” Petraits said. “It is our belief that children need to be in school whenever reasonably possible.
“A day out of the classroom creates an undue burden on parents who struggle with last-minute childcare and deprives our students of not only essential learning, but the routine, structure and nurturing environment they need.”
The district sent out the urgent message to parents and posted on social media said, “Due to excessive call-offs, the School City of Hammond cannot safely open its buildings today, April 24, 2024, and we must cancel school at all locations.” Because there would be no eLearning, students will make up the day in the future, the message reads.
The protest came hours after the board, at its April 23rd meeting, voted 3-2, with Trustees Carlotta Blake-King and Kelly Spencer voting against, to close Kenwood Elementary, 6416 Hohman Ave.; Lew Wallace Elementary at 6235 Jefferson Ave.; and Morton Elementary, 7006 Marshall Ave., in the city’s Hessville neighborhood. It then voted the same under separate cover for the personnel report, which included 173 employees who’ve been named for either reduction-in-force or let go because the ESSER funding is finished, according to the report.
Prior to the votes, the board announced it has reached a tentative agreement with the Hammond Teachers Federation over their contract, which has been under negotiation since the beginning of the year. Negotiations stalled in December for at least 120 days after HTF filed an unfair labor suit with the state against SCH for adding in more cuts to the contract after the referendum failed, SCH Superintendent Scott Miller told the Post-Tribune previously.
SCH Chief Financial Officer Eric Kurtz continued to paint a bleak picture of the district’s finances during the often-contentious, packed meeting that saw the board call for a five-minute recess three separate times. Several of the school’s major fund accounts are negative, with a balance of nearly -$3.9 million; closing the schools, therefore, would save $5.6 million of the $22 million it’s losing this year in ESSER II funds and because voters chose not to renew the school-operating referendum, he said.
By shedding of 13 administrators, eight building administrators, five health aides, 40 custodians, 30 clerical staff, 38 support staff, four IT people, six craft/transportation people and all 15 positions paid for with ESSER II money, the district will save an additional $10,284,454, he said. SCH started letting people go in February and will continue to do so until July, according to his presentation.
The corrective action will get SCH only to 2026, though, before new cost cutting will have to be considered, Kurtz cautioned.
“If you spend more than you take in, you run out of money,” he said. “Go back to 2017: It shows a negative cash balance. It came up in 2019 with the (Lafayette, Columbia and Miller Elementary) consolidations, but in 2020, it went back down. We serve a declining, aging population, and we have a declining number of school-aged children with more choices for them to get their education; we’ve lost 19% (of them) since 2016.
“You’re never going to hear me blame the parents. If anything, we didn’t get enough people to the polls. But this is not something anyone wanted to do — we had to get staffing in line with what we can afford.”
Many teachers, students and parents again expressed their dismay and frustration at the board and Superintendent Miller over their handling of the situation. Blake-King pointed out that the Indiana Distressed Unit Appeal Board warned SCH about its spending in 2019, but no one listened.
“What did we do? Nothing. And now we want to blame everyone but ourselves,” she said. “All we saw were lies, lies, lies, so we didn’t pass the referendum. We did this to ourselves.”
Michaela Spangenberg, with the Gary Education Coalition, echoed Blake-King.
“People were told not to use ESSER money for recurring expenses, so what was the plan all those years? You knew!” she said.
Jamaica Sawyers, a special-education teacher at Frank O’Bannon Elementary, said every school she attended in Hammond is now closed.
Board member Spencer said she would not vote for either corrective action unless Miller, Kurtz and Assistant Superintendent of Academic Services Michele Riise took pay cuts. Board Member Cindy Murphy warned that no one should want to vote “No.”
“Emergency managers don’t care about any of this. We have to do this,” she said, alluding to what happened in Gary when an emergency manager took over its schools.
SCH will use Wallace and Morton for early childhood services and Kenwood for storage, according to the resolution the board passed. The families of the 1,109 students that will be redistricted to the remaining schools will be notified by May 6 which school they’ll attend, while current out-of-district students will be notified by May 30 of where they can go and new out-of-district students will by June 18.
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
