A round of layoffs is coming at Keene State College next week after state-level budget cuts left the college with a significant financial gap to close by the end of next fiscal year.

The college is eliminating roughly 17 staff positions — two of which are vacant, according to Kimberly Schmidl-Gagne, affiliated staff association president.

The specific cuts will be announced Nov. 18, Schmidl-Gagne said.

In addition to the staff cuts, the college is looking for 12 to 15 faculty members to opt for voluntary retirement packages, Bill McColloch, president of Keene State’s faculty union, said.

A late October email from then–President Melinda Treadwell and Schmidl-Gagne notified the college community of the layoffs, The Equinox, Keene State’s college newspaper, reported.

The college has agreed to backfill 40% of those positions — that is, to hire roughly five of those positions back with newer faculty who are typically paid less than faculty with seniority, McColloch said.

As of last week, 12 applications for the voluntary packages had been approved, McColloch said. He said he did not expect any more than one to two additional faculty members to step down.

The planned staffing reduction is in response to a series of cuts the N.H. Legislature made over the summer, which lopped off $18 million in funding for the University System of New Hampshire over two years. That works out to be a $4 million trim for Keene State to reconcile by the end of fiscal year 2027, Schmidl-Gagne said.

Donald L. Birx, Keene State’s interim president, referenced the state cuts in a statement about the reductions to The Sentinel.

“The College continues to align resources with institutional priorities to ensure long-term stability while preserving, as much as possible, the student experience in and out of the classroom,” he said. “We are deeply grateful for the dedication of our staff and remain committed to treating all affected employees with fairness, dignity, and respect.”

In addition to Keene State, the public university system includes the University of New Hampshire in Durham and Plymouth State University.

In August, the University of New Hampshire laid off 23 employees and cut 13 unfilled positions, according to an article by the Portsmouth Herald.

McColloch said he thinks it is too early to rule out the possibility of more involuntary cuts or departures at Keene State given the financial uncertainty facing the college.

“Anyone saying that isn’t speaking from a sound basis,” he said.

Salaries and benefits make up Keene State’s largest budget line, Schmidl-Gagne said, hence the layoffs.

“When you have to make these massive cuts … there aren’t a lot of pools like theirs,” she said. “We’re trying very hard not to cut those [positions] that directly serve students.”

Those positions include academic advisers, support staff and staff who work in the residential realm, she said.

While the college will not announce which positions are being cut until Tuesday, Schmidl-Gage said Keene State is looking at “positions that supplement the front-line positions,” or those that might be redundant in terms of services they offer.

When it comes to keeping costs down, everything is on the table, Schmidl-Gagne said. There are conversations about how to better use customer relationship manager software — such as Navigate360 and Colleague Self-Service — which help students with tasks like figuring out which classes to take, she said.

The software would not be used in lieu of staff positions, she said.

All of Keene State faculty have the choice to opt for a separation package, whereas staff positions will be terminated, Schmidl-Gagne said.

In August, Treadwell, who departed Keene in October to become president of SUNY Geneseo, told The Sentinel that she did not think layoffs would be a part of the college’s response to the cuts. Because the cuts were made at the system level, the solutions would be, too, Treadwell said.

“We’re all trying to look at the scope and scale of what we need to do, and at this point, we’re not at that level of needing to pull any of those because we did a lot of that work during the early years of our tenure here,” she said in August. “It’s going to be a lot of work for us, but I don’t think some of those tools are going to need to be the ones we pull.”

The forthcoming layoffs are not Keene State’s first bout with budget troubles. Due to ongoing financial pressures dating back to 2018, the college underwent a multi-year restructuring initiative, using separation incentives and early retirement offers for faculty and staff as means of lowering a budget deficit discovered in 2017.

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