DALLAS — Friday was a difficult day at the Dallas Independent School District.

Declaring a financial emergency, the district revealed that a $64 million budget blunder may actually have ballooned to as much as $84 million.

That means the DISD will likely have to fire as many as 655 teachers and staffers to help stem the red ink.

Teachers breathed a slight sigh of relief late Friday afternoon when the school board tabled any decision about layoffs until next week.

But Superintendent Michael Hinojosa warned that something must be done to solve one of the district's worst financial crises in years. He said the cuts will be deep, and they will be felt all the way to the classroom.

"We can find all the rubber bands, and we can find all the paper clips, and we can find all those things," Hinojosa said during an emergency meeting of the school board Friday. "It's not going to amount to very much money."

The superintendent said massive layoffs will be needed to save the district — 655 people, an average of three employees at each of its 225 schools.

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The district hired 750 teachers more than it could afford.

There will be job cuts at every school, and that's on top of cutbacks at DISD headquarters and halting construction projects valued at millions of dollars.

Hinojosa's voluntary five percent pay cut did little to ease the pain being felt by educators.

"There ought to be other places that they could cut," said Dale Kaiser, president of the NEA-Dallas teachers' union.

Over protests by both parents and teachers, administrators say the layoffs are needed after a series of still-unexplained accounting errors left the district with an $84 million deficit.

The troubles began when trustees tried to reduce class sizes, hiring hundreds more teachers than the district could afford.

DISD staff says new checks and balances are now in place to keep administrators from overspending.

School board president Jack Lowe said this huge accounting blunder calls for big changes. "You can't fix a big budget problem by working on the small numbers," he said.

By tabling a final decision on layoffs, teachers are hoping that it could mean some way will be found to avoid deep classroom cuts.

Superintendent Hinojosa, however, said that scenario is unlikely. He urged the board to take action soon, because every week that passes, the district spends another $1 million.

E-mail jbetz@wfaa.com