Desert Sands Unified School District to Cut Jobs

What it comes to public education in the state of California things are become a rocky proposition indeed. I’m not talking about students, or their test scores, I’m talking about working for a public school system. More and more in the state more than others massive cuts are being made to education jobs both in and out the classroom. As it seems like every city and county in the state of California is being forced to make job cuts, as federal grant money subsidizing education workers begins to wear off, more and more school districts are cutting more and more jobs.

This time around job cuts are coming to the workers of the Desert Sands Unified School District. This week the school district board is voting on whether or not they’re going to lay off 130 of their current employees. The layoff action, which if the current proposed numbers pass will qualify as a mass layoff action by more than double the minimum amount set the federal guidelines, is not really matter of if people will like it laid off, it is more of a matter of how many people will be put out of the job when school board has to cut back.

This round of job cuts are designed to take pressure off the school board budget, which is insufficient under the current budget to pay for everyone on payroll and complete all the programs that the school district hopes to run for the coming year.

In a display of transparency the district has publicly stated exactly how many types of jobs are on the chopping block. Nine of the jobs the school board will be deciding on this week will come from custodial positions. 14 more jobs will come from bus drivers. Other positions only affected included unspecified positions in early childhood education and 70 in classroom educators. Of all the jobs listed only the teachers have been given preliminary warning that they may be out of the job. Under the terms of the union contract the school district must notify teachers of impending potential layoffs by 15 March. So the 70 teachers on the chopping block know that they may be laid off.The final notice as to whether or not those layoff notices stand must be received by May 15. This is one of the reasons why the vote is taking place on 5 May for the school board. Should they decide to layoff all, or some of the educators, they will have ample time to distribute permanent layoff notices.

The notifications from the vote, should the worker be cut, are expected to be delivered in the next week or so. Until then the workers will just have to wait and see if they are going to be out of a job for the coming school year. As bad as these cuts could be, the workers in the Desert Sands Unified School District are actually lucky when compared to education workers in other parts of the state, such as the city of Los Angeles where massive cuts are being made.