San Diego Unified School District to Cut Jobs

It looks like despite taking some serious steps to try and right its budget the school board of trustees for the San Diego Unified School District is going to have to get ready to layoff a large number of its teachers.

This week layoff notices went out to just about 1,700 workers for the school district, and this time all of them were teachers or in-class support staff. While the union is fighting the idea of layoffs tooth and nail, and calling for the school board to make just about any other cuts first, the layoff number will likely go down before the actual cuts come. Not because of the protests of the union but because the school district sent out a series of worst-case layoff notices.

You see the school will not receive its final budget numbers for the next school year until about the middle of this year. That means that the schools are guessing on how much money they will have when the budget is actually issued. Since the layoff notices have to go out by the 15^th of March, in order to abide by both state law and contracts currently in place with the union, the school is giving everyone who might be laid off a notice and then hoping that when all things come to an end they will not have to cut that many teachers. The school took a similar approach to the uncertainty of their budget last year and  the majority of those pink slips were not put into effect when the budget came through. This year however the school expects to face a serious shortfall.

We have talked about the schools budget problems for this school district in an earlier article but for those of you who missed it, or just don’t remember all of the details here is an excerpt that will get you up to speed:

“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.”

With unions unwilling or unable to negotiate it looks like this time the layoffs may be far more severe than last time.