Short $55 million to balance its budget for the coming school year, the Fort Worth Independent School District has so far agreed to pay as much as $10,000 to 209 of its teachers to retire or otherwise leave the district’s employ.

As reported yesterday by Texas Watchdog, the state’s largest school districts have been leaning heavily on attrition to reduce spending and have so far been mostly able to avoid laying off working teachers.

Please see detailed staffing and budget data for Fort Worth and eight of the other largest districts by clicking here.

Fort Worth estimates that it could pay out as much as $4.5 million in bonuses but could save $15 million in salaries for positions that would remain unfilled.

Fort Worth is following the lead of the Dallas and Abilene independent school districts in offering a kind of attrition stimulus program, encouraging longer-tenured, more highly paid teachers to accept a single payment of 10 percent of their current salary up to $10,000, according to a Fort Worth Star-Telegram story.

The district hopes as many as 600 teachers and another 100 other professionals eventually agree to take a bonus and leave. The deadline for the full offer is Feb. 29. Those notifying the district between March 1 and March 21 may receive 5 percent of their salary up to $5,000. And those signing up in the last days of March may get 2 percent with a $2,000 ceiling.

***
Contact Mark Lisheron at 512-299-2318 or mark@texaswatchdog.org or on Twitter at @marktxwatchdog.

Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and Scribd, and fan us on YouTube. Join our network on de.licio.us, and put our RSS feeds in your newsreader. We're also on MySpace, Digg, FriendFeed, and tumblr.

Photo of money by flickr user 401K, used via a Creative Commons license.