San Bernardino City Unified School District Lays Off Workers

It looks like bad news may be coming to the workers of the San Bernardino City Unified School District as their board of trustees is getting ready to vote today on the new budget and that budget will most likely include more layoffs for the schools.

The plan will be presented by Mohammad Z. Islam, the current chief business and financial officer for the district, will be presented on this Tuesday at 4 p.m. The current plan for the budget is not an optimistic one; it is in fact rather painful. The budget, as it sits right now calls for hundreds of layoffs in the next school year.

Under the current years staffing the schools have a teacher-to-student ratio of about 30-to-1. Once the staffing is changed, if the current plan goes into affect and the job cuts go into place the teacher-to-student ratio will be about 33-to1.  While this is not a stunning increase in classroom size it is still significant when you consider that this divides the attention of the teacher by another ten percent.

The current cuts are going to hit the students and staff of the special education department especially hard. About 30 percent of the cuts are expected to come from special education. It looks like about 24 of their teachers and 36 other aides are expected to be cut from the rosters if the current budget stands.

No matter how things play out the  budget there will be some job cuts down the pike. If things go as well as they possibly can then only 162 workers of the schools will be given layoff notices by the notification deadline in the middle of this March.  After the budget is presented the board will have to vote on it, and once the official budget has been approved there will be more solid information about the number of teachers and other staff members that will be let go from the school district.

Of course, San Bernardino City is not the only urban school district that has been having real problems with making ends meet, and solving that problem by letting go of educators. For those of you who missed out on our earlier coverage here is an excerpt about what is going on in another urban district:

“ It looks like even more bad news is coming to the Philadelphia school system, and that is really the last thing that they needed, as the school system has taken several hits in the recent past.

The current problem is that the city’s school district is in even more debt that they through that they were. A botched budget means that 2,700 service employee members have been given their layoff notices, in order to trim down $61 million from its budget by the beginning of June.

Union President George Richezza told the following toe a reporter for My Fox Philly about the situation, “We are the pulse of the school district. Nothing moves within a school district on the educational side unless we do our jobs – our bus attendants, our drivers pick up children…Every child that goes to school in a public school has a clean, safe, healthy environment that get there, and make sure when they do get there, that the educational process does not stall.”

It is estimated that about 500 workers will not get their scheduled raises this year; they are also being forced to take on furlough days and pay a greater share of their own health care.

In addition any worker who has a salary that is greater than $75,000 will be forced to take a pay cut.”