Glancing down the hallway at the Brooklyn Brownstone School, Nakia Haskins, the principal, did a quick calculation.
“Probably at risk, at risk, definitely at risk,” she said, pointing to the classroom doors of three star teachers. Each had been chosen from a pool of hundreds of candidates and now routinely works as many as 60 hours a week, but because they are among the city’s most recently hired, they stand to lose their jobs.
Schools across the city are bracing for layoffs as city officials estimate that as many as 4,400 teachers could lose their jobs, victims of budget problems in the city and state stemming in part from the recession. Barring any rescue plan from City Hall, Albany or Congress, the job losses, expected to be announced this week, would be the first major cut to the city’s teaching force in more than three decades.
But the schools that are likely to feel the layoff pain most acutely are the hundreds of new small schools that have been a cornerstone of Chancellor Joel I. Klein’s efforts to overhaul the city’s public education system. Because of seniority rules dictating who gets laid off first, the small schools stand to lose a disproportionate share of teachers.
The cuts are likely to decimate dozens of the new schools, which typically hire young, new teachers and rely on them to start new programs, design new lessons and spend countless hours helping students at any time of day. At Ms. Haskins’s school alone, at least four out of eight teachers are expected to lose their jobs if current projections hold.
“What makes any new school different is that the people who are in the school opt to be there,” said Ms. Haskins, who opened the Brooklyn Brownstone School in Bedford-Stuyvesant in 2008; it has about 110 students from prekindergarten to second grade.
Mr. Klein has indicated that few schools will be spared. But under the teachers’ contract, the teachers who were hired most recently will lose their jobs, and Mr. Klein has warned principals that they could lose any teacher hired since 2007. And while Mr. Klein has pleaded for a change in state law to override the seniority rules, there is no indication that will happen before the layoffs.
Under Mr. Klein and his boss, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the city has stepped up its practice of closing large, poor-performing schools and replacing them with smaller ones,