SAN ANTONIO – Less than a week after more than 100 teachers were laid off by the San Antonio Independent School District, the district is holding a teacher job fair Saturday at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.
“Teachers are very angry, I would say, about this job fair,” said Shelley Potter, with the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel. “They don’t understand why.”
Potter said 132 teachers lost their jobs after Monday’s emotional school board meeting.
Leslie Price, SAISD spokeswoman, said the layoffs came after two years of declining enrollment, including next year’s predicted loss of 800 more students, due to the expansion of charter schools within the district.
“I don’t see the exact same trend happening, but we will be watching to see how much lower it gets,” she said.
Price also said the district needed more applicants in case other teachers resign by the end of June.
“There’s just so much going on that I don’t know why a teacher would want to apply in SAISD," Potter said.
“I’ve never felt like this before,” Potter said about the district she’s loved and where she began her career as a teacher in the mid-1970s.
She said teachers who resigned instead of being terminated by the school board can reapply, but she doubts they will.
Price said the response to Saturday’s job fair is uncertain, given the circumstances.
“I’m sure that this does scare some people, having seen the reductions,” Price said.
Even so, she said, the district is doing all it can to stabilize its declining enrollment.
The teacher job fair will be held from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday in the Hemisfair Ballroom of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.