The San Diego Unified School board voted unanimously on Tuesday in favor of major layoffs.
The layoffs come as the district faces a $93.7 million budget shortfall. With the vote comes the start of a reduction in the number of educators, bus drivers, food service workers and administrators--more than 430 of them.
“We already lost a teacher earlier this year and my class was the one to be eliminated. Many classmates and I all had to go to different classes," a student told the district.
More than 19 people including students, parents, school administrators and labor leaders took to the podium Tuesday during the district board meeting.
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“I’m still trying to wrap my brain around where we didn’t work more to get to resolve things without impacting as many people as we are impacting," said a person at the meeting.
The district does employee math in a way that can seem opaque to the outside observer but makes sense if you approach it from a certain perspective. How, for example, one might easily wonder, how can the district eliminate, say, 0.1125 of a noon-time duty assistant at Carson Elementary? Well, it's possible that person only works 45 minutes per school day. How about 0.3125 of a classroom assistant at Twain High? Maybe they work three hours a day, four days a week?
Which is how the district is able to say it's contemplating a "reduction" of 27.985 English/reading/language arts teachers and 93.72 general-subject instructors at elementary school. It's far easier to understand, however, that one principal will lose their job, as will five associate principals. In all, 222.565 teachers are on the chopping block, including 21 central office administrators. As are, in no particular order:
- A half-dozen police officers as well as a pair of police dispatchers
- Various custodians, food-service workers and supervisors and a senior cook, painters, a locksmith, an electricians and several bus drivers
- A supervising arts specialist in the Visual and Performing Arts Department, as well as theatre and media specialists at Marshall Middle School and University City High School, clerks and school registrars
- The director of communications, the senior director of the Logan Memorial Education Complex, a network systems media support technician at iHigh Virtual Academy, seven family services assistants in the Placement and Appeals Department and a lead Braille specialist
- A pair of financial plan and development analysts, secretaries, noon duty assistants at 14 elementary and middle schools, the district's extended-day learning-program leader and five school-to-work transition assistants
Hundreds of positions, which can be identified with more precision in the attachments to Tuesday's meeting agenda, can be reviewed here.
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Pink slips, a notice of the possible upcoming elimination of a job, affect more than just the teachers who receive them, of course, including their families as well as their colleagues. In some cases, a position at a school will be eliminated but not the person filling that role, in which case they may be "bumped" to a new campus in the same or a similar role, depending upon their level of seniority
The school board president Shana Hazan and her colleagues will begin personally informing impacted employees on Friday that they have either been formally laid off. Next Tuesday, human resource employees will mail layoff and or "bump" notices to those affected by the budget moves.
Then, on May 15, final layoff and re-assignment notices will be sent to the workers,
Previous Pink Slips at San Diego Unified
The district also went through a pink-slip situation in 2017, when more than 950 teachers were given preliminary layoff notices. The district later said that buyouts had been taken a big bite out of that number; in the end, 371 probationary teachers were let go, as were 97 staff teachers. At that time, the district was facing a budget shortfall of $124 million.
In 2020, federal purse strings were loosened, and COVID relief funds of various origins filled San Diego Unified's coffers, to the point that last year, the district approved an aggregated 15% pay raise for educators (10% for this school year retroactive to July 2022, and 5% for next year).
According to the district website, 13,559 people are employed by the city school system, with nearly 6,000 teachers in campus classrooms.
Tuesday's Board of Education meeting will be held starting at 5 p.m. at the Eugene Brucker Education Center Auditorium at 4100 Normal Street in San Diego. Can't attend? A link to a livestream will be available here prior to the start of the meeting.
NBC 7 has reached to San Diego Unified out for a comment on the layoff plan and will include it here when it's received — Ed.
