Over the last summer, 37 full-time staff personnel were laid off due to the hiring freeze and budget cuts. This includes both main campus and the outreach school, where most lay-offs occurred.
“It was a significant figure, and that was due to the budgets cuts each department had to make. Everybody had to present their new reduced budgets to the board of trustees in May,” President of the Staff Senate, Rachell Stevens, said.
“None of these weren’t based on performance, they were re-organizations of the departments,” Stevens said. “For example, outreach school was re-organized and some of the faculty and staff were eliminated.”
Due to budget cuts, the university had eliminated 16 programs. However, there were no departments eliminated, instead they were merged with other departments.
According to the university’s June 2016 press release, The University of Wyoming Board of Trustees had approved a budget that reduced spending by about $19 million and internally reallocated about $6 million in one-time funding during the fiscal year that began July 1, 2016.
“Hiring freeze is lifted now. But there is a re-hiring process called Central Salary management (CSM), every time you hire someone to fill a position, whether it’s a new position or to replace someone who had already left, you have to get the approval and need to go through this procedure,” Stevens said.
Most of the lay-offs were due to budget cuts rather than hiring freezes.
“You can have a hiring freeze without lay-offs. That means, if somebody leaves a position, you don’t hire anyone to replace that position,” Stevens said. “We have been told there won’t be any budget cuts in the near future, that means no more lay-offs.”
However, if somebody quits or retires, from a position on campus, there is no gurantee that you will get the position back, you need to re-apply and go through the CSM process to get an approval to hire a person back into a position.
“We are aware that [a] number of individuals on campus have expressed concerns about the fact that we have reduced our number of staff, while we seem to be increasing our number of administrators. We are trying to keep an eye on that,” Stevens said.
The concerns over the dissatisfaction over the budget cuts were evident among some of the graduate students.
“I’m a PhD student in statistics, and now the Department of Statistics has been merged with the Department of Mathematics. This concerns me, because it might affect graduate funding and might reduce facilities,” PhD student, Priyantha de Silva, said.
A master Student of Chemical Engineering, Shavinka Fernando, was also affected by the budget cuts.
“There is no funding left for master’s student, because most of the limited funding are reserved for Ph.D. students,” Fernando said.
