Photo by JRoseC.

The District of Columbia’s public school system now says that about 750 teachers and support staff have been “excessed” for the 2011-12 school year, though they are promising to help those teachers find other jobs within the District.

Yesterday, news broke that several hundred teachers and support staff had received notice that their current jobs were being eliminated at the end of the academic year because of school budget and enrollment changes. Teachers and union representatives were quick to condemn the news as but a backdoor for the district to layoff teachers without actually having to fire them. (The process used to guarantee excessed teachers with seniority other employment within DCPS, though the contract agreed to last year by the Washington Teachers’ Union and then-chancellor Michelle Rhee tied reassignment to performance measures.)

Yesterday afternoon, DCPS attempted to spin the process as “normal”:

Jason Kamras, DCPS’s chief of human capital, who oversees the process of excessing says the process is “normal,” and that the majority of excessed employees are rehired by another school in the District.

“In fact, last year 79 percent of Washington Teachers Union members found placements at another DCPS school,” he says.

Approximately 350 of the 750 excessed employees are teachers this year. Kamras didn’t have information about the number of staff rehires, and also declined to provide a breakdown by school.

Kamras also said that he “expect[s] a high percentage” of the excessed teachers “to be picked up at other schools.”

Teachers who aren’t offered a job somewhere else in the system have options: taking a $25,000 buyout, a year at salary to keep looking for a DCPS job, or, if eligible, early retirement. But there are concerns out there that the current fiscal climate in the District might affect the city’s ability to finance such buyouts. This morning, we heard from an excessed DCPS employee, who told DCist that a WTU union representative told her that clause 40.1 in the contract renders the buyout “subject to the availability of funds” — leading the rep to opine that such buyouts were not going to handed out to teachers.