Louisiana School Cuts Show Which Services Go First When Budgets Shrink

What Louisiana’s legislature approved

The plan funds a 2,000-dollar stipend for roughly 51,000 public school teachers and a 1,000-dollar stipend for 40,000 school support staff by pulling 168 million dollars from K-12 school operating budgets. Each district’s loss equals the cost of its own stipend distribution. For Jefferson Parish, Louisiana’s second-largest school district, that amounts to roughly 11 million dollars. For Tensas Parish, 107,000 dollars. The average reduction across Louisiana districts is about 5 percent of state funding, according to Beth Scioneaux, who oversees finances for the Louisiana Department of Education.

The governor’s executive order restricted where cuts can fall. Funding supporting classroom instruction, transportation, food services, and security cannot be reduced. Districts must also draw on reserves before cutting programs. But school leaders pushed back immediately. Kevin Berken, a Republican member of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education representing Southwest Louisiana, put it plainly at a June 9 board hearing: “We’re not cutting fat. We are cutting meat.”

Ken Oertling, superintendent of St. Charles Parish, offered the most concrete picture of what that meat looks like. “Reducing $168 million in school operations funding will impact staffing,” he said. “It will impact programs. It will impact processes. These are not idle dollars.” His district has seen the number of developmentally delayed students rise 35 percent and the number of students with an autism diagnosis rise 30 percent over the past three years, he told the state board. Those students require more specialist staff, not less. A temporary restraining order blocked the plan briefly before being dissolved June 30. Education advocates withdrew their lawsuit. The cuts proceed.

The gap in what ‘protecting the classroom’ actually covers

The executive order’s carve-outs name the four most visible, hardest-to-cut categories. What falls outside them is instructive. School nurses, therapists, and counselors were explicitly left out of the stipend extension as well. Louisiana Federation of Teachers president Larry Carter noted what that means for the people doing some of the most intensive work: “That is a pay cut for people who have helped move Louisiana forward.” The same professionals cut from the stipend are the ones whose positions are not named in the protected categories. The budget structure links the two outcomes: they are not protected because they are not seen as core instruction, and they are not included in the reward because they are not classified as classroom teachers.

For families of children who struggle with reading, attention, or processing, this distinction is not administrative. It is the difference between their child seeing a reading interventionist three times a week and losing that support entirely. The science on early literacy support is unambiguous: the International Dyslexia Association’s 2025 definition states explicitly that language and literacy support before and during the early years of education is particularly effective. Reading specialists, speech-language pathologists, and intervention coaches are the professionals who deliver that support. They sit in the budget line that just lost its protection.

This is not a Louisiana-specific failure. It is a structural pattern. When districts face budget pressure, they protect what they can name in a policy order and cut what remains. The categories left unnamed are predictable: pull-out reading intervention sessions, school psychologist hours, occupational therapy for writing, auditory processing support. These services operate outside the four walls of the regular classroom precisely because struggling learners often need a different environment and a different pace. That difference in setting becomes a vulnerability when the definition of ‘protected instruction’ is drawn narrowly.

What this means for your child’s specific supports

Louisiana’s situation gives parents everywhere a concrete question to ask their own districts: which specific services are protected in next year’s budget, and which budget line are they in? A school’s answer to ‘are you protecting the classroom’ is almost always yes. The more useful questions are whether your child’s reading specialist is in the protected category, whether the school psychologist’s position is fully funded for next year, and whether any pull-out intervention programs are facing reduction. These are not aggressive questions. They are the questions that separate informed advocacy from the assumption that the system is handling it.

The children who depend most on these specialist services are, by definition, the ones whose needs extend beyond what the regular classroom delivers. When those services are cut, the path to identifying and addressing a learning difference gets longer. Processing gaps that go unaddressed early are harder and more expensive to close later. Louisiana’s lesson is not that teacher pay doesn’t matter. It does. The lesson is that when budget decisions frame ‘the classroom’ as everything worth protecting, the children who need the most targeted support are often the least protected.