Being a Teacher During Mass Layoffs

Cuts, confusion, and a funding crisis in Winston-Salem Forsyth County — the unfiltered reality of teaching in 2025.

My district, Winston-Salem Forsyth County Schools, has run itself into the ground. Teacher layoffs are happening across the country in 2025, but here, the school funding crisis has reached a breaking point.

Shorter, and nothing about phones or AI this time. But I needed to get something out before the day ends.

Years of revolving doors for CFOs and Superintendents. Overstaffing and overspending leading to a compounding of financial ills. A lack of any oversight, of fixes, and follow-through on financial matters. Bonuses out the wazoo. Layer upon layer of central office staff added, at salaries that must increase to remain competitive, so other industries or districts do not poach them off. And ESSER funds from the COVID years only put a coat of white paint on the sepulcher.

I can’t, or don’t want to speak about what went down at last night’s Board meeting when the long knives came out. The news article is here, video…

And this was after cuts earlier this year, with probably a few more (mostly) teacher jobs to cut in a week or so as final enrollment numbers become clear after the first ten days of class.

When I started Teacher, Teacher, I said one of my goals was to let people know what it felt like to be a teacher. While the financials are largely beyond me, I know how I feel.

And I’m not alone — either in this district or the country, as public education sees less and less money (hopefully not as bad as we do), and positions have to be cut. This sucks.

So here’s the raw view from my job these days…

In the trenches here, you cannot imagine what it's like. Even in another district, or think you can, you can't. It's bad. Morale is in the negative — somewhere that popcorn parties, jeans Fridays, and a million exclamation marks after “thank you for all that you do” at the end of an email can’t reach.

Trust for anyone above the job title of “teacher” doesn’t exist. Those still around who make it through this will never trust central office, whatever replaceable cog that wears the title “superintendent,” or the school board again. Ever. That’s not meant as any threat, and I hope it comes as no surprise to anyone on the board or warming a chair at central. That’s just reality that has been created, and I hope any school board member reading this understands that.

There's a creeping fatalism, a "what does it matter?" all over. Talk of other job openings in other industries.

Nothing makes sense about what’s coming— with the cuts, our building has the principal and the head of Guidance to essentially close and reopen the school (oversee facilities, make the schedules, plan the opening) next summer. Two people. 1,200+ students.

That cannot work.

Along with the loss of EC positions that will hurt some of our most vulnerable kids, we’re most likely losing a beloved media coordinator (who the fuck is going to turn the lights on in the library in the mornings, let alone run it?), counselors, and more.

We’ll lose admin. All of our admins are overworked with their specific jobs. They go, who’s going to do them? Sure, we have martyr teachers who will shoulder extra responsibility and will one day kill themselves for the job, but that’s a lingering question — will the remaining admin try to push new responsibilities off on us? Assuming admin-level tasks without paying us more? Seriously? Or will we spin down into a less efficient model where things get fixed in months, rather than weeks, and building routines are constantly being patched to correct problems? We already don’t have crossing guards.

When are we going to pull the car over to the side of the road so we can repack and reorganize this trip that we call the 25-26 school year?

I don't want to make light of any historical suffering. So I’ll compare it to fiction. Think of the part of Slaughterhouse-Five when they came up out of the bunker, or any "after the attack" or post-bombing scene, and you see just one horror after another after another as the protagonist walks through the ruined city? That's what it's like at work—people crying out in the open, thousand-yard stares, the stories of shitty things that are being done in tandem with these cuts, people working through "what am I gonna do?" Seeing an AP cry—when for all of your career, APs were the people who made other people cry—is something. The long sighs. The echo of an angry conversation before the kids are in the halls.

And - flashes of what feel like unreality in all of this — walking by a classroom and seeing teachers doing the work like normal. I'm putting on the show as well — swallowing, boxing up, compartmentalizing my feelings about this so I can do the job for my kids who need me to do the job. We’re not callous or ignoring the pain all around us. It’s just…what else are we supposed to do?

And the people who thought they were solid in their teaching positions that they just started, or were working towards their licensure, who suddenly found out they're now at the top of the list for going out, due to that alternative licensure. Some of them didn't realize what “option B” meant last night when it was voted on and approved.

I mean, imagine that...you think you're going in on a regular Wednesday. Someone tells you, just in conversation, that you're probably going to lose your job by the end of next month because of absolutely nothing you did... It's all because of horrible financial mismanagement that had been going on for a decade before you got here. Can you continue your journey to become a teacher if you can land a job in another district (since we’re under a hiring freeze), or will you be forced to give it up? Who knows? Maybe it’s in the envelope that you get from HR, or can be glimpsed somewhere in the “sincere,” “caring” look they give you, that they practiced so hard in front of the mirror.

And teachers who’re left with weird survivor's guilt.

And other teachers who have this look in their eye like a horse that’s ready to bolt if it hears one more twig snapping in the woods. All that white of their eye showing means they probably won’t be back next year.

And the loss of the institutional knowledge about the building, its facilities, and the systems that make it run, as the repositories of that knowledge pack up and leave. Would you want to sit down and write out how you did everything and where everything is after this?

And how are the admins who remain able to deal with this stress and the increased stress of the new reality? Will they take it out on us? Do they have the spine to handle this and remain professional? I want to say yes, but I’ve experienced a principal tear apart a school as a means of dealing with their inadequacies and shortcomings. Will that happen again?

And the fanfic of people in the halls grousing about how they would've done it, and kept everyone employed. Or people for whom the big words and numbers at the meeting were too much, and now demand that the Board do things they can’t.

Two other friends and I joking that we’ll be the final three teachers running the entire school, changing shifts on who locks up and who unlocks the doors and turns on the lights in the morning. Or about the recent episode of South Park where Mr. Mackey joined ICE. I hear they have a bonus.

Teachers can have dark senses of humor, probably because if you’re still a teacher after a decade and also still a functioning human being, you’ve seen and lived through some shit. You either laugh about it or you cry. Or scream.

The layers of stress. And the hoops that we still have to jump through.

Central office chairwarmers still demanding that this is the year we revamp PLTs, focus on SEL (we're doing an SEL lesson a day, every day through Friday), focus on vocabulary and literacy, demanding more accountability and more of our time spent not doing the thing we were hired to do - teach content. More hoops.

And with all these things that "central says we have to do..." in reality, we're not even sure the people who sent the email telling us to do these things will even have a job after next week. And we follow along, because one thing school leadership learns early and strongly is that if they want to continue being school leadership, they get compliant with the whims and wishes of people who don’t teach. And the con$ultants.

And you better have your EQ on the board so they can see it if they walk by, and your door better be closed and locked — it doesn’t matter if your CO2 monitor says 2250 ppm, and that’s well into the unhealthy zone. Comply, you compliant zombie. Comply.

And some of my fellow teachers who have been driving me nuts since the Federal shit started hitting the fan (pick your outrage) and acting like everything is continuing along normally are still just continuing along as if everything is normal. They’re either Buddhas of serenity in a way I don’t understand, stoned or have lost their minds. I’m not sure which.

It's all just so strange.

How can we work a normal day when this is a constant buzz? This is fucking distracting in a way that is hard to express. I may not be losing my job (fingers crossed), but dozens of people I know and care about are. And our kids, here and across the district, will suffer for their loss.

And the kids, God bless them, they feel it too. And because of the coverage on the news and the fact that it’s the talk of the town, they know about it too. At least a little. Some of them see that we’re, collectively, hurting, and there’s nothing that they can do to make us feel better. And that makes them feel bad.

I love our kids.

And as a total YMMV thing, I understand it. I hate myself for understanding it and having begrudging respect for the interim superintendent. I get why they can't cut the local teacher supplement to save jobs, I get why they can't just "get money" and throw it in this bottomless hole.

I get it.

I get that if these cuts weren't made, making payroll in October would've been a near impossibility. I get that this shitty thing was long in growing, so it will be long in fixing.

But what if, in the fixing of the shitty thing, a critical mass of people start to feel this is a shitty place to work, and leave? What if we right the ship, and no one wants to crew it?

I'm okay—the guilt is the thing I hate—but I'm here, and these kids need teaching.

And my school is a “good” school — great kids and parents, hard workers, many college-bound. Tons who are legacies, and/or proud to be here. I can’t imagine what it’s like in a school with discipline problems that’s looking down the barrel of losing administrators. The hyperbolic predictions write themselves, so I won’t.

Oh, and what's going to burn some people out—there will never, ever be anything that looks like justice for this. There will never be any closure, no guilty parties doing a perp walk. It's not happening. That's going to be hard for people to wrap their heads around.

And then—someday—we'll get back to business as "kinda" usual, smaller, with less money, fewer staff, but the same shit. The same lack of respect from central office, the same being taken advantage of because we care for our kids and what we do, and the same vague threats to our jobs when we're not goosestepping just so.

September 12th was named as the day the reduction in force will be done, the final day of work for those being affected. I don’t believe that at all, but a lot of us — we’re hunkering down and going into survival mode until then. After that, another round of survival mode as we peek out to see what the “new normal” looks and feels like. Some will start planning their exits for sure, some will lean in to do the work, some will further zombify, some will find some peace and come to an understanding in themselves about the world as it now exists. I’m not sure which camp I’ll be in.

We cannot choose when we are born or the conditions in which we live, but we can choose how we live and how we respond to the conditions of our lives.

Or so I keep telling myself.

Thanks for reading.

Hope you’re having a better day than my brothers and sisters and I here in the Winston-Salem Forsyth County School System.

Postscript: Thursday, 8/21 — just heard that a friend in another hall is out. They were planning to leave at the end of the year, but with all of this, they felt that it wasn’t worth sticking around until the target showed up on their back. It begins.