Most Northeast Georgia schools plan to order teachers to take three days of unpaid furlough to comply with a cost-cutting request from Gov. Sonny Perdue.

For some school systems, that means teachers will be paid for only seven — not 10 — planning days this year. The number of days children are in class will not to be impacted by the cuts, however.

Clarke County schools Superintendent Philip Lanoue notified teachers and other staffers late last week to attend only a single paid pre-planning day — Thursday — instead of the four days of planning time the district had set aside before school starts Aug. 6.

The furloughs come on top of cuts that already cut into teacher salaries as school districts in Northeast Georgia and across the state approved recession-shrunken budgets in the face of sharply lower tax revenue. In Clarke County, that meant teachers now are paying more for health and dental insurance, as well.

Many teachers believed the remainder of their paycheck would be safe — at least for a while, said Lane Guyer, a first-grade teacher at Winterville Elementary School.

“There’s just a lot of additional things that were subtracted out of your paycheck to make it less,” Guyer said. “This is just one more thing, and it’s starting to become too much.”

Furloughs are among a number of responses schools, universities and other state-funded agencies are making to comply with Perdue’s request for an additional 3 percent spending cut. Statewide, furloughing all 180,000 teachers for three days will save about $100 million.

Perdue doesn’t have the authority to require teachers to take time off, but state schools Superintendent Kathy Cox will ask the state Board of Education on Tuesday to waive the state’s 190-day contract requirement for teachers so local districts can implement furloughs, education department spokesman Dana Tofig said.

“There is a provision in the law, which says in times of true economic emergency that the state board can waive the rules,” Tofig said.

“Basically, we’re creating flexibility that will allow districts to go ahead and do the furloughs if they wish, if they want to go that way,” he said. “And we’re hearing anecdotally that some will, some won’t.”

Most of the 13 school administrators who joined a Northeast Georgia Regional Educational Service Agency conference call about the issue Friday said they planned to implement teacher furloughs within the next five months.

Some, like Lanoue, are preparing to shorten the number of pre-planning days teachers have to attend — though the change won’t necessarily mean all teachers will be staying home, Jackson County Superintendent Shannon Adams said.

“The truth is, a lot of teachers in our school system will come to school to get their classrooms ready, no matter if they get paid or not,” Adams said.

However, the Oconee County School District doesn’t plan to eliminate planning days in the week left before school starts, Superintendent John Jackson said.

“One thing we do know for sure is we have decided we’re not going to take any of the furlough days during pre-planning — it’s just too short notice,” Jackson said. “We’ve got too many things already planned for those days.”

All school systems likely will have to make tougher decisions in the weeks ahead to address the 3 percent cut, keeping in mind the state still could require more reductions by the end of the year, Adams said.

“We just don’t have anywhere else to look for cuts other than personnel,” Adams said. “We have exhausted all of our other options.”

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