Carlsbad Unified School District Cuts More than 100 Educators

More education job cuts are coming to the Carlsbad Unified School District. A number of workers, at a minimum 116, are expected to be handed layoff notices by the middle of March, when a new budget will have been approved and job cut decisions will have the time to have been made.

Currently, the vote, which will to come to pass on Friday, are expected to cut back at least 116 full time jobs. We do have an unprecedented amount of data about the kinds of jobs that are going to be cut back in order  make the budget work. We know that of the cuts 60 will be elementary educators, six will be art teachers, eight will be science teachers, eight will be math teachers and one will be a the only librarian in the entire school system. Other cuts will be made to Phys Ed, music, English and Language departments.

The teacher layoffs are part of a serious set of cost cutting measures taken by the school district in order to make a budget deficit. The budget deficit is about $11 million, and it will go into affect on the 1^st of July. Give that the school district has an operating budget of about $82 million this is a sizeable chunk of the budget.

Of course, the Carlsbad Unified School District is not the only California school to have serious budget issues that are resulting in the layoff of teachers. Our earlier coverage of the San Bernardino City Unified School District showed the following:

“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.”