Tagged: budget cuts

About 10 percent of Delgado Community College's 465 employees will be laid off at the end of next month.

Chancellor Monty Sullivan said Tuesday the layoffs are a consequence of the school's $13 million deficit and declining enrollment. Sullivan says no teachers will lose their jobs in this action.

College spokeswoman Carol Gniady tells The Times-Picayune the 46 people who will lose their jobs are classified and unclassified employees, categories that include secretaries, clerks, bookkeepers and maintenance personnel.

The state's Medicaid hospice care received a last-minute reprieve from shutdown, but Gov. Bobby Jindal's administration is moving ahead with other health care cuts this week.

Slated for elimination are programs that provide behavioral health intervention services for at-risk children and that pay for at-home visits by nurses who teach low-income, first-time mothers how to care for their newborns.

Gov. Bobby Jindal's latest round of budget cuts is falling on shelters that take in battered women and other domestic violence prevention providers.

The reductions were made to help close a $166 million midyear budget deficit.

The Advocate reports funding for family violence prevention and intervention programs was cut by more than $998,000. That's a 16 percent drop in the dollars spent on contracts the state holds with shelters and other domestic violence programs.

Louisiana's health department is acknowledging that planned cuts in the state's Medicaid program will eliminate hospice care for all Medicaid recipients beginning in February.

Hospice care aims to make dying people more comfortable in their final months of life. In announcing reductions to hospice care funding last week, officials with Gov. Bobby Jindal's administration said hospice care at nursing homes would not be eliminated.