New York City teachers whose positions were axed thanks to controversial budget cuts are now scrambling to find jobs at other schools.

Park Slope music teacher Paul Trust told The Post he had just purchased new percussion instruments for a “Drums Around the World” unit he was planning next year when he and his Brooklyn school’s other music instructor were told they were being let go.

“As things stand, there’s going to be no music program next year,” said Trust, who had been at the school since 2009 and teaching since 2005. “I don’t know if the school has ever not had a music program.”

Some of the booted teachers are finding new positions — although not exactly in their wheelhouse.  

At a Brooklyn elementary school with a bilingual program, two teachers who otherwise would have been let go were moved to vacant positions for English and Spanish learners in kindergarten.

The problem is, neither of the teachers speaks Spanish.

“It’s not uncommon for people to teach out of placement,” said another teacher in the program. “But it is uncommon to teach a dual language program and not speak Spanish.”

The school’s principal made the move to keep the displaced teachers from having to go elsewhere, the source said.

City Department of Education officials would not tell The Post exactly how many teachers were recently let go, or “excessed,” from Big Apple schools because of budget cuts stemming from lower enrollment, only describing the figure as similar to previous years.

Some members of City Council have ripped the education cuts — even though some of them had voted to approve them as part of the Big Apple’s overall budget.

Schools Chancellor David Banks insisted to a round table of reporters last week, “We expect for all those excess teachers to get picked up,” or soon assigned to different posts.  
“It’s several hundred teachers that have been excessed. We have several thousand teachers to hire this year,” he said.

But some of the “excess” teachers — and the city’s Council of School Supervisors and Administrators — said that no matter what Banks claims, they expect fewer than usual to be hired back.

For now, the DOE is working to place current “excess’’ employees in  vacant spots as opposed to hiring outside candidates.

The “excess teachers’’ are still being paid by taxpayers, at least for now.  

“The excessed teachers will get picked up first. Many of them will be picked up in the next couple of weeks,” Banks insisted.

Nathaniel Styer, a rep for the department, added, “This is done to ensure that … that we are able to keep teaching talent in our system.

“As we do every year, we will monitor the vacancy and excess numbers on a regular basis and make adjustments as needed in hiring restrictions to ensure all schools are staffed in September with qualified teachers,” he said.

Meanwhile, Trust and other internal candidates still without posts are currently applying for positions at schools throughout the city.

“I’m a little scared from doing preliminary searches,” Trust said. “There seems like a lot of candidates for very few positions because of this budget situation … And the arts are always the first thing to go.”

Jessica Beck, a former middle-school English teacher at 75 Morton in the West Village of Manhattan, secured her next gig through that process but said teachers are not interchangeable to a school community.

“I’m thinking about the kids that I left,” Beck said. “There are students who I worked very hard to build relationships with. Some of them, the walls immediately went up when they heard that I was leaving. Some of them cried. Some of them asked middle-school questions, like, ‘Why couldn’t it be another teacher?’

“They need some stability, and this rocks their world to lose adults that they built trust with,” she said.

Beck, a veteran teacher with 18 years of experience but only a handful of years with Big Apple public schools, said she was let go based on seniority. She said she was told the school would lose 12 or 13 positions in all.

Education officials said the tough decision on who goes is left up to principals.

“I don’t dictate to any principal what teacher goes,” Banks said. “We just simply say, ‘Here’s your budget,’ and those decisions around who goes and who stays are made by the school principals.”

School administrators do what they can to keep their teachers on staff, sources said.

At the Brooklyn elementary school with the kiddie bilingual instruction, the teacher involved in the program was sympathetic to the principal and the decision that was made to put two teachers with her who don’t speak Spanish.

“The principal is being forced into this position. I don’t believe the principal is intentionally undermining this program,” she said.

In the meantime, Trust wondered what would become of his school’s new drums without the staff to use them.

“I used them for graduation, so they got a little use,” he said.

“But right now, they’re stored in the closet — and who knows when they’ll come out again if we’re not there.”