On Tuesday, 10 Pleasant Valley School District teachers who were hired in recent years received telephone calls that they were being let go.

Most taught at the elementary school, but some worked in the district’s other schools.

Superintendent Lee Lesisko cited declining enrollment and trimming the budget as reasons for the furloughs.

The preliminary budget released at the school board meeting on May 14 showed a deficit of $3.8 million in the general fund for next school year with that number growing each year.

Since the dates to pay property taxes has been extended due to the pandemic and job losses, Lesisko said the school district doesn’t know how this will impact the district’s revenue. The deficit could increase.

“We can’t keep increasing the budgets,” he said. “We are trying to be fiduciarily responsible to our taxpayers.”

He said salaries make up about 80 percent of the budget.

Lesisko said that when he first started working for the school district in 2006, there were about 7,000 students in the classrooms. During the 2019-20 school year, there were 4,115. There are several hundred additional students that attend cyber, charter and private schools, as well as home-school and other education options, but they are not included in this number of students in the district’s classrooms.

The Pocono area saw a surge in population after Sept. 11, 2001, because of people moving into the state from New Jersey and New York. Then after the recession in 2008, people lost their jobs and started to move back. That decline in population has continued, which affects the tax base as well as enrollment.

Lesisko said he has heard that people from New Jersey and New York are once again looking at real estate in the area and some have purchased houses here, but it’s too early to know if this will impact enrollment.

If enrollment picks up or if more people retire, then Lesisko said some of these teachers could be invited to return.

“We care about people. We don’t want anyone to lose their jobs,” he said.

The teachers who were let go fall into the category of temporary professional employees. Their layoffs are not related to their teaching ability. Lesisko explained that they are people who have less than three years of professional teaching experience in any school.

In order to get tenure, a teacher has to have more than the three years of professional teaching experience, satisfactory evaluations, and be certified in the grade that he or she is teaching. This means a person who is certified to teach English in high school should be teaching that subject in order to get tenure.

Lesisko said the school district will be checking to make sure that people certified to teach a specific subject are in the right place. They will also look at the classroom sizes and make adjustments. Last year, the classroom size was between 20 to 25 students. Students who need extra assistance in the classroom or who have Individual Education Plans will not be affected by the layoffs.

“The bottom line is that we have ample staff to teach,” he said.