Education used to be a stable career field, one where after you were in the job for a while it was really, really hard to get put out of a job. In this case the job cuts are coming to the workers of the schools of the San Gabriel Valley, in California, and they are slated to impact a large number of workers.

Pink slips went out to 500 workers for the end of the school year. The layoffs notices had to go out by yesterday in order to satisfy both the state laws and the contract that the schools have with the union.

At the current moment the school has laid off everyone that they think that they might need to let go of in order to be prepared for the fiscal realities of the state budget when it comes. On the whole the system allows the schools to cut back on workers when they will need to, but it also means that unless the worst case scenario comes to pass the majority of the workers will not be let go. So there is some hope for the displaced workers. The states final budget will be announced some time in May.

Many schools in the state are taking a better safe than sorry approach to the fuzziness of the state budget. For those of you who missed our earlier coverage on the much more dire situation in the LA schools here is an excerpt:

“It looks like bad news is coming to the Los Angeles Unified School District and it just might cut back on the number of educators who are currently working for them. The school district has to make some serious cuts to the budget, which will come out in the next couple of weeks. The notices are expected to come after the official budget layout is announced in the next couple of days. This plan will be based on a final budget number that was approved back in the middle of February. That amount means that several workers are going to be let go in order to meet this number.

You may be wondering how many workers will be let go. At the current moment we don’t have a final number, but we do know that a significant number of employees, 11,700, will be given layoff notices once the budget is line itemed, according to estimates. How many of those workers will be teachers, and how many of them will actually be let go once the notices are issued is, at the present moment unknown.”

The same thing is going on in San Diego as well:

“It looks like despite taking some serious steps to try and right its budget the school board of trustees for the San Diego Unified School District is going to have to get ready to layoff a large number of its teachers.

This week layoff notices went out to just about 1,700 workers for the school district, and this time all of them were teachers or in-class support staff. While the union is fighting the idea of layoffs tooth and nail, and calling for the school board to make just about any other cuts first, the layoff number will likely go down before the actual cuts come. Not because of the protests of the union but because the school district sent out a series of worst-case layoff notices.