San Diego Schools May Cut Jobs

It looks like school cut backs are coming to the city of San Diego. The San Diego Unified Board of Education is considering layoffs in order to make ends meet next year. As the members of the board are taking their first peeks at the budget, and their $90 million gap, for the next fall.

How they plan to make up the shortfall does not have to be figured out right away. The school board has about one week to figure out how to close the gaps, deal with the inevitable political negotiations and submit their final plan to the County Office of Education for the 2012- 2013 school year.

Now for the tricky part; the plan has to be able to deal with all of the budget shortfalls, but it cannot rely on any of the unions, or non-union employees, choosing to make concessions in previously negotiated raises or benefits in order to make the budget work. This means that basically, whatever the city’s school board puts out will be a kind of a worst-case scenario budget.

Because of these terms the school district is looking into some radical cuts to personnel in the schools. Right now they may have to lay off slightly more than 800 of their current full time staff members between now and the end of next summer, before the new school year begins.

And if the negotiations go poorly then things could get even worse for the schools. If the city school district is not able to re-negotiate the continuation of five unpaid furlough days for the staff, which are set to expire in the current contract and manage to talk the teachers unions out of their next pay increase then there could be up another 760 jobs cut in order to make ends meet. Considering that the school district has five different employee unions to negotiation with getting all of the agreements in place could be a massive feat.

School Board President Richard Barrera told board members that the schools were already understaffed, so making these new cuts could be detrimental, and avoiding them was vital. He told a reporter for KPBS Radio News the following about the cuts. “We’ve got an opportunity in the next couple months to come together the district and our employees and talk about what we can do to solve these problems,” he said “And we’ve got an opportunity as an entire community for people to come together to advocate against the mid-year cuts.”

If the mid-year budgets cuts are needed, they will be between $26 to $30 million, that will mean the loss of 50 more full time members of the teaching staff by the 1st of February. Since it is the middle of the school year these cuts would be made to support and administrative staff instead of to the faculty.

Before the beginning of this school year the San Diego Unified School District was forced to lay off 1000 workers in order to remain solvent. Those cuts did include some members of the teaching staff.