Merced County Schools to Layoff 22

Layoffs to education have been hitting just about everywhere as schools, with stunted budgets from state and local sources cut back hard, and Merced County is no exception. This week the Merced County School Board issued layoff noticed to 22 workers in order to balance its budget. Though on the bright side officials within the school expect that when all is said and done the layoffs will only impact about 15 workers.

This assumption, of course, is based on the idea that workers who got the pink slips will use the sonority clause built into their contracts to have less senior workers put out of a job in order to save there own. This practice, known as bumping, is a common feature in agreements for civil service workers. In the last couple of months bumping has become a serious concern for younger workers in schools, county offices and other areas. While bumping is designed to protect the workers with the most time on the job, it by no means is a guarantee that the best workers will remain on the job, or that the best teachers will remain in the classroom. Many districts are making attempts to work around sonority in order to keep more productive teachers in the classroom.

In an interesting twist the school is citing a decreasing number of students, instead of a decreased budget, as the reason for the layoffs this time around. Still 22 is a small number of cuts when compared to the numbers that some other school districts are facing in order to make ends meet. Anyone who reads this site regularly will know about the epic level cuts that could be coming to the majority of schools in the State of California. Most districts have issued notices while they wait for the final word on the amount of money that they receive.

In the city of Philadelphia things are downright grim. For those of you who missed out on our earlier coverage here is an excerpt:

“Things have not been great for the schools in the city of Philadelphia, as you already know if you live in the area, or if you follow the coverage on this site. The district was dealt another blow today when a third round of layoffs rocked the schools. This time it was 1,400 employees that got the boot. While these layoffs were not to the teaching staff, instead they came to the blue-collar workers who deal in facilities and transportation maintenance services; this is still a serious loss of jobs for the city.

This was not the first mass layoff for the city of Philadelphia in the last 12 months. In September the city’s school district had to cut jobs by about 850. Then over the summer roughly 1,000 teachers were cut from the budget as well.  So on the whole the schools have shed more than 3,000 jobs since the end of the last school year.

At the current moment however the officials for the school district are hoping that the settlement of a dispute with the workers union can mitigate some of the layoffs. If the members of the Local 32BJ, Service Employees International Union, are willing to make some concession than they will be able to keep some of the jobs.”