San Diego Schools Vote to Cut 1,000 Jobs

It looks like there will be more education job cuts to the civil servants in the city of San Diego. This week the city’s school board has voted to cut back on 1,000 positions in order to cut back on it expenses. The vote was split, but had enough of a majority to pass and have the pink slips issues to city workers.

The 1,000 jobs cuts will all come from non-teaching positions and still the cuts have not been popular in the community.  Despite the fact that these cuts are much smaller then the ones expected under the city’s preliminary budget, which would have cut free about 1,600 workers.

The job cuts are expected to cut teaching aids, office workers and support staff like those in the janitorial and food services departments. While they are not teaching positions many parents  believe these cuts will impact the safety and level of education being given at their schools.

These cuts are part of a bid by the city to shore up a $122 million hole in the budget for the upcoming school year. While this move does make significant strides to plugging up the hole in the budget it is, by far, not the only cuts that the school board has had to make in recent months. For those of you who missed out on our earlier coverage on the recent layoffs in the San Diego schools here is an excerpt that will get you up to speed in no time at all:

“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.”