If you live in the state of California, pay attention to what is going on in the world of education or just happen to be a devoted reader of this site then you know that there are some serious job cuts slated for schools districts in the state. As the money from the federal stimulus fades away at the end of the year the states are all faced with some very wrenching decisions to be made about their budgets. In with those decisions, which the states have had several years to prepare for, are some fairly large cuts to the in classroom teachers.
For those of you who do not have an idea of how bad things are in the state here is an excerpt that will get you up to speed in no time at all.
“It looks like things are getting much, much worse for the schoolteachers in the state of California. We have been talking a lot, in the last couple of weeks and months about the kinds of cuts that are being made to the schools in the state. In a lot of cases those cuts are being made in generic terms we know how many workers are going to be let go, but we do not know how many of them will be classroom teachers. Today we had some light shed on those numbers.
According to information released by the California Teachers Association an estimated 19,500 classroom teachers were given layoff notices over the past couple of weeks. The layoff notices had to be given by the 15th of March in order to be legal under the laws of the state of California. So if an educator did not get a layoff notice by that date then they are free and clear, at least until next years deadline.
The cuts, which are coming because of the need to cut 20 Billion in funding from the state education budget. Unless the schools get a tax increase from voters in the near future, which is on the ballet, the schools will have to make these cuts, which average out to about $370 per student in the state. The only good news for schools is that the number of enrolled students at California schools is, depending on where you live, either staying stable or shrinking.”
Of those 9,500 are expected to come from the school district in the city of Los Angeles and those layoffs are in contest. On Monday the administrative hearings about the layoffs began this week. The hearing are set to determine which of the jobs will exactly will cut. The schools have been very clear to emphasis that not everyone who got a pink slip will be on the way out the door, as the schools have been playing a conservative strategy. They sent out layoff notices to a worst case scenario number of workers and then seeing where else they can make cuts in order to recover the job.
In the case of the city of LA the budget hole to plugged up is a serious one, with about $390 million more to be spent in the budget then they have to spend, if no workers are cut. Of course a similar situation happened last year, as the stimulus began to taper off. In 2011 about 7,300 layoff notices were sent out to LA educators. In that case almost 50 percent of the people who were given a layoff notice were were able to keep their jobs. Will the same thing happen this time? We won’t know until the hearings come to an end, and the pink slips that are going to be implemented are begun.