Following the recession, the Hollister School District made drastic staffing cuts. As of this school year, though, the numbers are back to pre-recession levels.
The district’s Director of Human Resources Dennis Kurtz called the 2007-08 school year the “good old days” before the recession-related cuts and noted that the district had a ratio of one full-time equivalent staff member to every 10.8 students. In the 2012-13 school year, which Kurtz called “the pits,” the district had one staff member to every 13.5 students. This school year, the district is back to having one full-time equivalent staff member for every 10.8 students.
“This is just two years ago and in the total staffing sense we’ve brought ourselves back to where we were,” said Kurtz. “We got ourselves back to were we were before all these bad things happened.”
Since 2012, the education field has changed. The state’s new Local Control Funding Formula was first broached in December 2013. The new Common Core State Standards – which had been mentioned in the crisis years – are currently being implemented with the first new standardized assessments with results that count this year. The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting of 2012 also changed the way school districts across the nation look at student safety.
“We still have more work to do but we’ve done a lot,” said Kurtz as he flipped through PowerPoint Presentation graphs showing student enrollment numbers and staff-to-student ratios. “We made a major turnaround here and you can see it in every one of these graphs.”
