‘What the heck just happened?’ Springfield teachers navigate uncertainty, grief in midyear layoffs

It was sixth-grade teacher Megan Brown’s prep period when it happened. She was standing outside her classroom at Hamlin Middle School on Jan. 20 when she saw her boss, principal Brandi Starck, walking down the hallway.

Because layoff announcements were expected that day, everyone knew what was about to unfold.

“Am I going to cry?” Brown asked her boss as she approached her door. Starck nodded grimly.

Brown sobbed when her boss informed her she was one of the 27 teachers to be laid off midyear in Springfield Public Schools. She was eight months pregnant and had a long list of questions. What about her health insurance and maternity leave, she inquired. Starck answered as much as she could and let Brown leave early for the day.

Brown’s husband, Austin Brown, drew her a bath that night, complete with candles. She knew she had to keep her stress in check for the baby, but she was heartbroken. She and her husband decided to pray.

“Make it make sense,” she said to God that night. “I know you have a plan, even though I have no idea what that plan is. I trust you to guide me and help us through this difficult time.” 

Two days later, Brown told her students, and there were more tears. One of her students went home sick after hearing the news, and another, who was losing other teachers in addition to Brown, refused to attend his classes. Brown knew she, her husband and their new baby would be OK, but she wasn’t as sure about certain students.

“Some of these kids only make connections with one person,” she said. “If I’m that one person — I really worry about those kids.”

While Brown finished off the semester with as much gusto as she could muster, other teachers mentally prepared to uproot and move to entirely different schools — and in some cases to different grade levels — due to a subsequent staffing reshuffle.

The news of midyear layoffs in Springfield was a shock to many. The cuts were a direct result of the cost of a new teachers union contract approved last week with a retroactive, 4% pay increase for the 2025-26 school year. Bargaining began April 8, 2025, and the Springfield Board of Education adopted its 2025-26 budget June 9. Confusion remains about why Springfield Public Schools did not include any teacher pay increases in the 2025-26 budget. Some community members blamed board members, one of whom resigned after she and her children received threats.

Away from the vitriol and boardroom drama, however, teachers and students have been grieving the loss of stability, jobs and trust in leadership.

Hard goodbyes

High school history and government teacher Brandon Ferguson sat in his classroom grading papers Jan. 28. He just finished his last class of his last day at Springfield High School. Some of the students who regularly hung out in his room sat quietly with him.

Because layoffs happened unevenly due to teacher seniority rules, some staff were moved around to fill gaps. Ferguson was notified the week prior that he was going to be transferred to Hamlin Middle School to teach eighth-grade social studies.

After his last day at Springfield, he brought home notes from students and chocolates from co-workers. He left the boxes of classroom decor and supplies in his car over the weekend, knowing he’d need them in his new classroom the following Monday. 

In the whirlwind of wrapping up union bargaining, which he was heavily involved in, and saying goodbye to co-workers and students, he thought to himself: I’ll deal with next week when I get to it.

He had little knowledge of the Hamlin classroom he was stepping into. Ferguson taught middle schoolers before — when he was younger and had more pep in his step.

“I’ll just need to pack energy drinks with me to make it through the rest of the year,” he said, jokingly.

Like Brown worrying about her gaggle of sixth graders, Ferguson’s mind was on the students he was leaving. The students who tended to connect with him the most were the “goth, emo, punk” types, he said. Some had difficult lives outside of school. And some of his seniors had known Ferguson since they were in eighth grade, having been in his class during his last year of teaching middle school. This made the seniors a special cohort for Ferguson.

One senior had leaned on Ferguson through struggles with self-esteem and issues at home.

“Thank you for being a father figure when I didn’t have one at home,” the student wrote in a goodbye note.

‘Grief is unexpressed love’

Lo Campbell, former eighth grade science teacher at Thurston Middle School, was still in a daze Feb. 3, the Tuesday after her last day at Thurston. She spent the previous couple of days applying for unemployment benefits and letting herself grieve.

“I’m so disappointed,” she said. “I’m still asking questions like, ‘What the heck just happened?’ That decision was so fast.”

Campbell didn’t start teaching until she was 40. Previously, she was a Peace Corps volunteer, a farmer and a caretaker for adults with developmental disabilities. Being a teacher, however, has been her favorite career to date.

“Teaching is — there’s nothing like it,” she said. “Getting to be with children for the majority of their waking life — we are the adults they see, and it is so challenging and beautiful and heartwarming and painful to be some positive adult in a child’s life.”

When Campbell was laid off, she and her students were in the middle of a physics unit, learning about noncontact forces like gravity and Newton’s laws of motion. She adored her “independent,” “goofy” eighth graders, and prided herself on being able to see and cater to their different learning styles. 

Campbell was only in her third year at Thurston, but was already seeing the fruits of her labor. The school’s eighth-grade science state test scores were rising. Campbell worries the progress she made will be lost. 

Between concrete quandaries like whether she can still see her therapist or simply afford groceries, Campbell was figuring out how to say goodbye to the job and students in which she had poured so much of her energy. 

Someone once told Campbell: “Grief is like unexpressed love.”

A bruise on Springfield’s record

A week after Brown’s last day at Hamlin, yellow mums still lay brightly in a vase on her kitchen table. They were among her sixth graders’ many parting gifts, including Dr. Pepper, chocolate milk, Doritos, elephant stuffies (her favorite animal), games, stickers and even a baby toy.

Brown had learned in a recent doctor’s visit that her baby boy would have to be delivered via C-section because of his positioning. She was a week and a day out from the scheduled delivery. Every plan she made was changing, but she was trying to think on the bright side. She and her baby would be OK.

To her relief, the district found a way for her to keep her paid maternity leave. Because she was so close to her due date and therefore unavailable to work, she likely would not have qualified for unemployment benefits, leaving her and her husband in financial uncertainty. The maternity leave would give them a runway to figure out what was next.

Teachers are familiar with layoffs, Brown said. Districts shedding positions at the end of a school year due to budget shortages is common. But midyear layoffs are not common. Though she loved the students and Starck, her principal at Hamlin, she worries Springfield’s reputation will take a hit from the layoffs that have disrupted students’ and teachers’ lives.

“You want to work somewhere where you’re valued,” she said. “Even in the big districts, you want to feel valued by the highest person in the district, and this does not give us that feeling.”

Megan Brown delivered her son, Eli Russell Brown, Feb. 12. Both Megan and Eli are healthy and have returned home.