Broward Schools expects to lose 8,000 more students and $79 million next school year

Broward County Public Schools is bracing for serious budget cuts.

While student enrollment at Broward County Public Schools has dropped by nearly 38,000 over the last ten years, staffing numbers hardly fluctuated by comparison. Now, the school district’s financial situation is “out of whack,” said Superintendent Howard Hepburn at Tuesday’s meeting.

In their first meeting to discuss next fiscal year’s budget, school board members and district staff discussed the possibility of staff reductions in the future to account for the district’s shrinking student population and the resulting loss of funds.

The numbers don’t look good: enrollment is estimated to decrease by about 8,800 students during the 2025-2026 fiscal year, which means a loss of over $79 million in state funding, according to an analysis by Romanier Johnson, the district’s chief financial officer. In the meantime, the district is anticipating a reduction in funding from state lawmakers, who are in session until May 2.

“It’s going to be a pain point for the district,” Hepburn, who was appointed a year ago, said during the meeting.

In a statement, BCPS chief communications and legislative affairs officer John Sullivan said Hepburn is “prioritizing the elimination of vacancies, finding operational efficiencies and leveraging attrition over the coming years to address this complex challenge.”

The declining student enrollment has been a thorn in the district’s side for years as it struggles to address it and save money. Though the district has about 45,000 empty seats, closing schools has been extremely unpopular with the public. After years of pushback, the board finally decided to close just one school, Broward Estates Elementary, which outraged the Lauderhill community. Other underenrolled schools will be converted into K-8 and 6-12 schools and the Broward Estates building will be “repurposed” into an early learning center.

Decrease in students, increase in staff

One slide during the presentation drew the most attention. The graphic compared the relatively steady number of staff to the steadily declining number of students over the last 10 years.

“This is a house on fire kind of moment,” said board member Allen Zeman.

In the 2015-2016 school year, BCPS had 26,476 staff members and about 221,000 students. By 2020, though enrollment dropped by about 5,500, staff numbers increased by about 2,000, partly for two notable reasons.

In 2018, following the mass shooting in Parkland, the state required school districts to have at least one armed officer in every school and Broward voters approved a referendum to hire more security and mental health staff. When the pandemic hit, the federal government allocated millions of dollars to Broward to save jobs and hire new employees. The district didn’t reduce its number of employees until the 2022-23 school year, when staff dropped by about 1,000.

This school year, there are 26,900 staff members and about 192,000 students. All told over the last 10 years, staffing increased by 324.

“This slide, I felt like we should fall out of our chair and I didn’t see any chairs flipping around,” Zeman said referring to the graphic. “You cannot run an organization like this.”

Hepburn said that while BCPS is overstaffed by about 2,000 positions, he stressed that large lay offs are not imminent. Major changes to staffing are likely the following school year.

“We’re not abruptly laying off 2,000 people,” he said. “That’s definitely not the case.”

Zeman, who has advocated for closing underenrolled schools despite the unpopularity, said staff would have had to decrease by 4,500 — in proportion to student enrollment. He said the district needs a “reasonable” ratio of students to staff and suggested “delayering staff, closing schools.”

“You guys can say repurposing all you want, I’m just over it,” Zeman said. “I know we have way too many schools for the number of students we have and each of those schools comes with a whole bunch of people. There’s a way to responsibly reduce staff over time if we are responsible about the number of schools we continue to maintain.”

Board member Sarah Leonardi said the board’s discussions on how they approach this issue needs to be “very sensitive and precise.”

“It may be easy to say we need to remove or lay off thousands of people but these are people’s livelihoods,” Leonardi said. “I would argue that the vast majority have an impact on students one way or another. I think the way we talk about this has to be very thoughtful.”

‘We have to change’

Hepburn listed potential solutions to cut spending, starting with a hiring freeze on central office positions. Some staffing allocations need to change, he said, like how every middle school has three assistant principals regardless of school size.

“There may be some grumblings over the summer because there’s going to be some small incremental shifts,” Hepburn said. “If you ever read that book ‘Who Moved My Cheese?,’ change is hard for a lot of people, but we have to change. We have to become more efficient yet effective at the same time.”

Hepburn also mentioned changing teacher work hours as a possibility, but Broward Teacher Union president Anna Fusco said teachers’ schedules are locked into their contract and cannot be changed easily.

Fusco argued that teachers are not the problem with the budget and that schools are actually “understaffed in all phases.” The board should prioritize avoiding cuts in the classrooms, Fusco said, especially since teachers faced layoffs last year regardless of how populated their schools are.

“I know we have a budget situation, so they keep saying, because we don’t get funded properly from the state. That’s a fact,” Fusco told the Herald. “Now, you have to meet the needs because our enrollment is decreasing in certain areas, in certain schools. But the first place that you should never look to cut people is in a school, in any school, unless it’s gravely underfunded and under enrolled.”