FRESNO, Calif. (FOX26) \u2014 The Fresno Unified School District approved a retirement incentive earlier this week, aimed at saving the district money by allowing over 500 employees to retire.<\/p>\n
As enrollment continues to drop at the Fresno Unified School District, district leaders are cutting costs, this time by reducing staff.<\/p>\n
So far, 573 employees have agreed to retire early after the board approved a retirement incentive program.<\/p>\n
“And do so in a way that prevents budget cuts that will be painful for us down the road,” said Patrick Jensen, FUSD Chief Financial Advisor.<\/p>\n
Over 1-thousand staff members are qualified for the retirement plan, but with 573 employees opting in, the school district estimates it will save over 56 million dollars over the next 5 years.<\/p>\n
Those savings, however, depend on one key factor: not backfilling the vacated positions.<\/p>\n
“So now the easy work has been done, the hard work remains, and that is streamlining the district and ensuring that we don’t, as we decline in student numbers, we can’t go back to increasing the number of adults in the system. So those savings are highly dependent on not backfilling the positions vacated by retirees,” said Jensen.<\/p>\n
According to the district, there were 11 hundred fewer students enrolled this year, with further declines expected in the coming years.<\/p>\n
That trend has forced Fresno Unified to plan for 50 million dollars in budget reductions over the next two years.<\/p>\n
“$13.7 million with the savings is a large number, but if we’re targeting $50 million, this is not, this isn’t going to completely close the gap, but it’s going to help close the gap partially,” said Jensen.<\/p>\n
The board approved the incentive in partnership with the public agency retirement services.<\/p>\n
The supplementary retirement plan would give employees 80 percent of their 2025\/2026 base salary, paid out over 5 years by the district.<\/p>\n
But district leaders acknowledge the retirements come with challenges.<\/p>\n
“We have a lot of employees who have a lot of expertise in their field that will be departing, and replacing that knowledge gap is going to be hard. And a strain on our system, but I recognize this is an opportunity for us to do both, as you mentioned, honor our employees who’ve been with us for a long time,” said Elizabeth Jonasson Rosas with the Fresno Unified School District.<\/p>\n
Those choosing to retire will begin receiving payments next year in August,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FRESNO, Calif. (FOX26) \u2014 The Fresno Unified School District approved a retirement incentive earlier this week, aimed at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103439,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[112,114,113],"class_list":{"0":"post-103438","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fresno","8":"tag-fresno","9":"tag-fresno-headlines","10":"tag-fresno-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}