The School District of Osceola County has cut almost 800 positions since last school year as enrollment declines, the district confirmed Thursday, a startling turnabout in an area that has been growing rapidly for years.
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The cuts “prioritize staff compensation and meet the demands of rising costs,” district spokesperson Dana Schafer said in an email. Osceola County lost about 2,000 public school students this year and has been dipping into reserves to support salary increases over the last several years, according to the district.
Janet Moody, the president of the Osceola County Education Association, said she hasn’t seen cuts to this extent since the 2008 recession — and lackluster state funding is to blame. Enrollment drops erode district revenues since much of the state’s education money is distributed on a per-pupil basis.
“We are in crisis in our public schools,” Moody said.
Schafer said positions were eliminated “from all schools and departments” and that the district was able to place “all regular continuing contract employees” in new positions. Moody said none of the district’s 3,815 teachers lost their job as a part of the cuts because Osceola had left vacancies open after teachers retired or left over the last several years.
However, the district did not fill the positions of about 100 classroom teachers and about 300 support staff — such as literacy coaches and guidance counselors — after they retired or left over the last two years.
“Students don’t have as many people meeting their needs as they once had,” Moody said.
The idea of large-scale cuts is a stark departure for a district that has been largely growing in recent years.
Osceola County’s population has ballooned since 2020, and is expected to reach half a million residents in the next decade. Population growth usually brings an influx of public school students. But the rise of state-funded voucher use, which allows families to pay for private or home schooling with public school funds, combined with declining birth rates means fewer students are entering the public school system than before.
Along with declining enrollment, Osceola Superintendent Mark Shanoff said the district has seen “drastic” reductions in year-over-year funding from the state. Eliminating positions and undertaking “strategic abandonment and reduction of programs” should save $53.6 million in spending.
“Simply put, we have dipped so far into reserves just to get ourselves to survive this last round of cuts that we have nothing left to cut and no more money left to give,” Shanoff said in a video explaining an upcoming tax referendum that seeks to bolster school budgets.
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In June, Osceola said it faced just a $7 million deficit heading into the 2026-27 school year, after pulling $37 million from its so-called rainy day fund in the past two years to avoid more drastic cuts. At the time, district leaders declined to specify what they would do to stabilize the district’s fund reserves.
Osceola, which serves about 52,000 traditional public school students, is one of many Central Florida school districts being forced to make cuts.
Last month, Orange County Public Schools cut about 100 classroom teachers, which came after slashing about 200 district-level positions last spring. OCPS lost almost 8,000 students this school year.
Seminole County Public Schools, which lost about 2,000 students this year, faced a $30 million budget deficit heading into the 2026-27 school year, and subsequently cut 190 instructional and 52 support positions.
But despite being a smaller district than OCPS, which has about 13,000 classroom teachers and about 181,000 students, Osceola’s cuts far exceed what Orange eliminated.
Osceola publicized the cuts this month as it asks voters to approve a new one-mill property tax in November.
The tax amounts to $1 for every $1,000 of taxable property value. The district, which currently receives about $8,900 in state per-pupil funding, said it could budget an additional $950 per student if the millage is approved.
Without the proposed tax and with current levels of state funding, Osceola anticipates a $100 million budget shortfall over the next four years.
“State funding is not keeping up with inflation, which means this millage will help bridge the gap,” the district wrote on a website dedicated to promoting the millage.
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