Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News:
Updated: 5:17 p.m. Tuesday, July 17, 2018 | Posted: 3:42 p.m. Tuesday, July 17, 2018
Wright State University will begin laying off 26 employees this week in a new round of budget cuts for the school.
Affected employees will be notified this week and next week, according to an email sent to faculty and staff by Wright State’s Human Resources Department that was obtained by this news organization.
As many as 40 employees could be terminated, president Cheryl Schrader said in June. But that number was expected to shrink if the university is able to eliminate vacant positions as opposed to laying people off, Schrader said.
Wright State will offer affected employees career counseling, resume assistance and contacts for unemployment benefits among other things, according to the email. Employees who are laid off and their dependents will also be eligible for tuition remission for up to two years, according to WSU.
Once employees are notified that they will be laid off, Wright State will allow them to search for a new job “during work hours,” according to the human resources email.
“Any time we talk about a layoff among our friends and colleagues it really is a very difficult conversation,” Schrader said in June.
The layoffs are part of the latest budget cuts at Wright State as school officials anticipate revenue to decline by around $10 million during fiscal year 2019, which started July 1.
When trustees slashed more than $30.8 million from last year’s budget, they planned to lay off around 120 employees but attrition allowed administrators to shrink that number to around 47.
Revenue declines in FY 2019 will largely be the result of another decrease in enrollment, according to the university’s budget. State appropriations are also projected to decrease by around $1.4 million.
Enrollment on Wright State’s main campus is projected to decrease by 6.5 percent overall, amounting to around an $8 million drop in tuition and fee revenue. The tuition and fees students pay is Wright State’s largest single source of revenue, as it is for most colleges.
