The Five Stages of Grief (Budget Cut Edition)
I always assumed that if I left McKinley, it would be because I chose to.
Maybe for another opportunity. Maybe for a career change. Maybe because I finally lost my mind after hearing “Can I go to the bathroom?” 14,000 times.
I didn’t expect it to happen because of budget cuts.
And yet, here we are.
After seven years at McKinley, I found out my position is being cut.
Seven years.
Which officially makes McKinley the longest full-time job I’ve ever had. Which is ironic because I took the job completely on a whim after leaving CCI.
At the time, I was hired as a special education teacher. I spent my first three years at McKinley in special education before eventually transferring into the science department.
Which honestly feels like two completely different careers somehow stitched together into one life.
I remember thinking the job would probably just be temporary.
Instead, it became an entire chapter of my life.
And now, like all grieving processes, I seem to be cycling through the five stages.
Repeatedly.
Sometimes all before first period.
Stage 1: Denial
“There’s probably been a mistake.”
Surely you don’t accidentally cut the environmental science teacher who built an entire lab program around a polluted urban creek.
Right?
Surely someone will walk into the room and say: “Good news, Ryan. We found 1.0 FTE behind the second floor copier.”
But no.
Budget cuts don’t really care about nuance.
They don’t care about the Scajaquada Creek Environmental Science Lab. They don’t care about community partnerships. They don’t care about the hours spent building programs, adapting curriculum, or trying to convince teenagers that macroinvertebrates are actually fascinating and not, in fact, disgusting.
Budget cuts are spreadsheets.
And eventually you realize spreadsheets don’t know you.
Stage 2: Anger
This one’s tricky because I’m not really angry at McKinley.
I’m angry at the reality of education right now.
Teachers are constantly asked to innovate, build relationships, integrate technology, differentiate instruction, support social-emotional needs, collect data, improve scores, and somehow also survive mentally and financially.
And then one day, a spreadsheet says: “Actually, never mind.”
There’s something uniquely brutal about a profession where the people doing the most creative, relationship-driven, impossible-to-quantify work are often the first things cut when money gets tight.
Especially programs that don’t fit neatly into a testing box.
The irony is that some of the most meaningful work I’ve ever done happened outside the traditional classroom structure.
The creek projects. The citizen science. The partnerships. The field experiences. The moments where students stopped asking “Why do we need to learn this?” because they were standing in the middle of the actual problem.
That stuff mattered.
It still matters.
Also, somewhere along the way, I apparently became unofficial building maintenance.
At one point, there was a staff bathroom toilet that had been broken for over a year. A full year. Eventually I got tired of hearing about it, watched approximately three YouTube videos, walked into Home Depot with the confidence of a man who absolutely should not be trusted with plumbing, and fixed it myself.
Honestly, that might be the most accurate metaphor for public education I’ve ever stumbled into.
Things break. Nobody has the time or money to fix them. And eventually some exhausted teacher says: “Fine. I’ll do it.”
Stage 3: Bargaining
“Maybe there’s another position.”
“Maybe something will open up.”
“Maybe if I teach six different subjects, coach three sports, and quietly become the assistant boiler technician, nobody will notice the budget math doesn’t work.”
Teachers are professional bargainers. We’ve built entire careers out of duct tape, caffeine, and the unshakeable belief that we can make impossible situations work if we just try hard enough.
So the bargaining brain doesn’t shut off easily.
It starts reasonable. Maybe there’s a role in the building I haven’t considered. Then it gets creative. Maybe I write a grant. Maybe I propose a new program. Maybe I reframe my entire job description in a way that makes the spreadsheet suddenly care about macroinvertebrates.
And then it gets a little desperate.
I caught myself genuinely calculating whether I could absorb a second certification area, pick up a co-teaching assignment, and somehow also keep the creek program running on my lunch break.
The answer was no.
But I ran the numbers anyway.
Because that’s what bargaining is, really. It’s not delusion. It’s just the part of your brain that isn’t ready to let go yet — still doing math on a problem that was never really a math problem.
McKinley is where I grew into being an educator. Where I learned how to teach AP Environmental Science. Where I turned an idea about a polluted creek into something students actually cared about. Where someone once asked me, completely seriously, whether raccoons could theoretically survive a zombie apocalypse.
Important scientific discussions.
It’s hard to do the math on leaving all of that.
Stage 4: Depression
This is the stage where the small things start hitting when you’re not ready for them.
Realizing I may never teach in that classroom again.
Thinking about students I won’t see graduate.
Knowing someone will eventually clean out cabinets full of creek sampling equipment and have absolutely no idea why there are rocks, turbidity tubes, and water testing kits everywhere.
There’s grief in losing routines. Grief in losing an identity you didn’t realize had grown around you.
For seven years, I wasn’t just Ryan.
I was Mr. Sajdak.
The environmental science guy. The creek guy. The AI guy. The teacher who somehow always said yes to one more thing.
And the hard truth is that teaching stops being a job after a while — especially at a place like McKinley. It becomes part of who you are. Which is beautiful right up until the moment someone tells you it’s over.
Stage 5: Acceptance
I’m not fully here yet.
But I think acceptance looks something like this:
What we built mattered, even if it wasn’t permanent.
The students mattered. The work mattered. The community partnerships, the late nights, the field work, the grant writing, the chaos — all of it mattered.
I went from a special education teacher taking a job on a whim to someone who helped build real environmental education experiences connected directly to Buffalo and the Scajaquada Creek.
That’s real. No budget cut changes that.
And while losing this position genuinely hurts, I also know this probably isn’t the end of my story in education.
There are opportunities ahead that could lead somewhere new. It’ll be different. I may not teach environmental science again — at least not the way I have at McKinley. There’s also a real chance I end up back in special education, which feels strangely full circle given that’s where my journey at McKinley started.
That idea scared me at first.
Because when you’ve spent years building programs and creek projects and an identity around environmental science, stepping away feels like leaving part of yourself behind.
But the more I sit with it, the more I think the subject area was never really the point.
It was the students. Helping kids believe they were capable of more than they thought. Building relationships. Creating experiences that felt real.
That exists in special education too.
Honestly, that’s where I first learned how to teach in the first place.
So maybe this isn’t starting over.
Maybe it’s just adapting again.
The location may change. The classroom may change. The subject may change.
But the reason I became a teacher hasn’t.
And after seven years at McKinley, I think that’s something worth holding onto.
