The Education Directorate is expecting a possible increase in occupational violence as a result of sweeping budget cuts across many ACT public schools.
An internal multi-hazard risk assessment document viewed by The Canberra Times shows the directorate created a crisis management team to deal with the fallout from changes to public school budgets in 2027.
It said principals may suffer stress, anxiety and conflicts as they communicate the impact of budget cuts, such as changes to staffing, to their communities.
The risk assessment shows there was a medium risk of occupational violence as a result of the budget cuts.
"Where student supports are changed or decreased, this could lead to escalated student behaviour resulting in increased incidence of occupational violence," the document states.
Some public schools are cutting the number of learning support assistants after their budgets for 2027 were slashed.
This has sparked concerns from staff and parents because learning support assistants help teachers manage behaviour of students with disabilities, learning difficulties and trauma backgrounds.
Australian Education Union ACT branch president Angela Burroughs said the budget process was putting enormous stress on principals.
"It feels like déjà vu. It feels like what they had to do in 2025, and that was because at a system level there wasn't adequate oversight of workforce planning," Ms Burroughs said.
"It seems that nothing has happened in 12 months, which is really frustrating."
She said principals were concerned about inaccurate data being used to make decisions, such as outdated enrolment projections, and that students with additional needs would not have those needs met.
"It's a major concern that our principal members have been raising with us that they might have got a budget allocation for additional student support, but it's not sufficient to provide [for] the needs and one-on-one support that some students require.
"So, to give you a concrete example, a school that knows that they will have two students who require intensive one-on-one support are receiving $16,000 for that support. Now, that $16,000 doesn't buy you a person, so they are going to have to use other parts of their budget to be able to provide that if they're allowed to."
Education director-general Jo Wood said the crisis management team was a corporate structure used to manage complex work within a short timeframe.
"There's been a really intensive process of bringing a whole range of different subject matter experts together to work with principals on what the options are for their school, looking at their timetabling, class compositions, looking at a whole range of their staffing structures in schools, and looking at where there are opportunities for efficiencies and streamlining," she said.
Ms Wood said $40 million would go towards funding for students with complex behaviour support needs and an "exceptions funding pool" would be used to address risks that cannot be managed by schools within their budgets.
She said a risk assessment would be completed at the school level at the start of term 4 and schools would have their final budgets by mid-November.
Education Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said school budgets were not finalised for 2027 and that it would be an "iterative process" with school leaders.
"I recognise that that conversation's been really difficult, and that communication probably could have been better," Ms Stephen-Smith said.
"Timelines maybe were very very tight for principals. It's been a complex process. It's the first time that we've done school budgets in this way, and so we've learnt through the process as well."
Opposition education spokesperson Elizabeth Lee said the changes would have a huge impact at schools that were already operating under budget pressures.
"That has an impact on everything, from the disruptions to student learning to the impact on teacher wellbeing to, of course, addressing occupational violence and anti-social behavior that we see in our schools."
Last month the Education Directorate said 19 public schools would have funding cut of more than 5 per cent between 2026 and 2027.
However, data obtained by The Canberra Times suggested at least 37 schools would have a funding cut of more than 5 per cent based on the actual amount of funding they received this year.
Ms Stephen-Smith said the directorate's figures were based on the actual spending of schools in 2026.
"There is an alternative approach where you could say let's look at the budget they were given for 2026 versus the budget for 2027. But the reality is we know that a lot of schools are spending below their 2026 budget already," she said.
"I recognise that there are other ways that you can cut those figures, and we've taken that feedback on board, and I think that's legitimate feedback."
Ms Wood said the directorate was working on modelling the impact of the projected budgets under the new student resource allocation calculations.
"One of the consequences of leaving 93 schools to kind of manage individually is we don't have the best system-level data to see what's happening at each school," Ms Wood said.
"Now we're getting to the more granular level of what are the individual decisions that are being made at school level and what are the impacts. So I think as we go through this ... we're learning a lot. We're getting much better data that will help us to kind of bring the timeframes forward for future years."
She said school principals have access to wellbeing supports.
