As the Lee County School District wrestles with next year’s budget, claiming a deficit of $46.7 million – one thing is clear: With teachers hired after 2011, it’s not last in, first out.
As news filters through schools making budget cuts for the 2026-2027 school year, that’s not a surprise.
At least not to Kevin Daly, president of the Teachers Association of Lee County or TALC. Since the passage of Senate Bill 736, teachers are on one-year contracts renewable (or not) based on state-mandated evaluations. Teachers who had contracts before that year fall under terms of their original contracts.
So a teacher with 15 years of recent experience who is doing a “highly effective” job, according to state evaluation criteria, is at just as much risk of contract nonrenewal as a first-year teacher.
“So what we've been hearing is that people that have been around the district for a while are being non-renewed,” Daly said. “And people that have not been in as long are the ones that are being kept some places.”
That’s all according to law.
So is the situation that is surprising to Daly: the lack of communication between the district and the union as the district contemplates and makes cuts, Daly said.
In prior years – meaning before the administration of Superintendent Denise Carlin — the Lee County School District administration engaged the teachers union early in the budgeting process, when it was clear that staffing cuts had to be made.
“We've always been able to kind of get in and take a more humanistic view of this where, OK, we need to make some cuts, but we know the law kind of says we can do what we want to, but we're going to have an order of operations. So in the past, we would do like probationary people first, and then we would do annual contract people kind of based on seniority and certification.”
But the union has not been involved in the process.
“When we got rumors of the budget and these cuts, we asked for a while if the district was interested in kind of engaging in those discussions this year, and they told us they weren't,” Daly said.
Daly said it’s been up to the building administrators to warn people of non-renewals. And he can tell when this has happened, because he will receive a flurry of calls from a certain school on a certain day. He was unable to estimate how many calls he has received so far.
By the current collective bargaining agreement, teachers need to be notified about whether or not they have jobs next year by May 11, Daly said.
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