CTA chapters kick into crisis mode as 14,000 teachers get pink-slipped
Volume 12, Issue 6 - March 2008
By Mike Myslinski
The CTA Board of Directors has adopted a new organizing plan to beat back the governor’s historic proposed cuts in education. Angry teachers are heeding its goals of showing the impact of these cuts on students and making it a local matter of immense urgency.
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| San Francisco schools chief Carlos Garcia joins UESF President Dennis Kelly at a rally protesting pink slips. |
Everywhere, it seems, teachers are speaking out to the media about the school cuts and layoffs destroying public education. Developed by members, leaders and staff, the CTA state budget crisis organizing plan involves targeting local lawmakers. It will guide the union’s fight to get a state budget that funds schools and colleges and protects Proposition 98, the state’s minimum education funding law.
CTA is part of the statewide Education Coalition, which has been coordinating news conferences around the state that bring together teachers, administrators, parents, school board members and education support professionals to explain the significance of the cuts. (Track the coalition’s progress at www.protectourstudents.org.)
Working with the statewide Education Coalition or local coalitions — and within a new, broader coalition of firefighters, public employees, religious groups and many others — teachers are sounding the alarm about what are the deepest cuts ever proposed for the nation’s largest public school system.
With more than 14,000 teachers — over 18,000 when ESP and other employees are included — getting pink slips by the March 15 deadline for districts to notify teachers that they might not have jobs next year, CTA chapters and leaders went into crisis mode to fight back as the magnitude of the state’s budget deficit hit home.
Faced with the governor’s unprecedented $4.8 billion in proposed cuts for education, school districts targeted thousands of teachers, counselors, librarians, nurses and many others for layoff.
“These cuts will not heal,” says CTA President David A. Sanchez. “They will leave scars on generations.”
Noting that the state already ranks 46th in the nation in per-pupil spending, he adds, “As dedicated educators, we know our students and communities deserve better than these reckless cuts.”
School districts have until May 15 to make final teacher layoff decisions, and CTA attorneys are fighting the notices in special hearings, but the shock and uncertainty unleashed by the avalanche of pink slips continue to spread far and wide.
The shock waves rocked the huge San Diego Unified School District, the state’s second largest, where the 903 pink slips included about 800 educators.
“We are going to fight these layoffs and we are going to defeat them,” vows Camille Zombro, president of the 8,000-member San Diego Education Association, which is also entering contract negotiations.
She says one strategy is to file 450 grievances — rather than hold administrative hearings — on behalf of all probationary teachers who got the layoff notices, as allowed by the SDEA contract. While SDEA is working within the local education coalition to focus attention on the governor’s drastic cuts, it will not let the school board off the hook even though it is part of the coalition, says Zombro.
“I feel strongly that our school board is hiding behind the state crisis. They have been making decisions in a bad way. We’re not going to give our school board a pass.”
Excessive pink slips are causing morale to plummet in the Chula Vista Elementary School District, the state’s largest K-6 district, where 557 notices have been sent out.
“The superintendent says he is just casting a big net,” notes Peg Myers, president of the Chula Vista Educators Association. “I think the net is way too wide. People are very upset.”
Massive Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, did not issue any pink slips to permanent teachers, saying its size gives it budget flexibility. But there is concern that some of the estimated 3,000 administrators who got notices will bump probationary teachers out of jobs, warns the 48,000-member United Teachers Los Angeles.
In Orange County, the Santa Ana Educators Association agreed to take a pay cut two years ago to help the district with its finances. That’s one reason why the 573 teacher layoff notices sting, says SAEA President David Barton.
“There’s a fair amount of resentment. People are afraid they can’t pay their mortgages.”
While the district did not vote to eliminate its class size reduction program, it did issue pink slips to all 250 K-3 teachers in the program, says Barton. That means larger class sizes in the lower grades are likely. His 2,700-member chapter is about to enter bargaining and is upset over the district’s opening proposals to cut teacher salaries.
On March 14, pink-slipped teachers joined state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell for two news conferences decrying the cuts.
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| UESF member Ginny Zeppa was featured on CNN after the San Francisco rally. |
Joining O’Connell in Los Angeles were Aisha Blanchard-Young, president of the Inglewood Teachers Association, and Lorraine Wiener, an Inglewood High School librarian who was one of 150 Inglewood Unified School District educators to receive layoff notices.
“I was shaking all over when I got the notice,” says Wiener, the only credentialed librarian in the 15,000-student Inglewood district. “I love my job. The students are very upset. Some have been hugging me and asking me if I’m OK.”
In Sacramento, education stakeholders joining O’Connell included Rody Boonchouy, a teacher at Leonardo Da Vinci High School in Davis, where the majority of teachers have been given layoff notices.
“The governor’s budget fails to invest in our future,” O’Connell said. “We should be encouraging the best and brightest to join the teaching ranks. We know that effective teachers are the number one element in student success. Sadly, the flood of pink slips being handed out only discourages people from entering the teacher profession.”
In San Francisco, pink-slipped high school English teacher Ginny Zeppa spoke of her disillusionment at a March 11 United Educators of San Francisco rally against pink slips. She later appeared on a CNN segment after doing an interview in her classroom about being one of the 535 San Francisco Unified educators who got notices.
“It feels like I am committed to something that is really important, but that someone else is trying to say I am not needed,” says Zeppa, who teaches at John O’Connell High School. “I know I’m needed at my school. This feels like a slap in the face.”
Another San Francisco teacher, Kristen Vogel, and her husband Tim Sanborn, a temporary teacher in Santa Rosa, ended up on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle in a teacher layoff story that ran March 14. Before they found out each was getting a pink slip, they had put in an offer to buy a house in Petaluma.
Pink-slipped teachers from Mt. Diablo Unified in the East Bay joined Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, Senator Tom Torlakson and other lawmakers in a March 17 news conference in Concord that blasted the drastic school cuts. The district, which issued 189 layoff notices, had been making progress in salary negotiations with the Mt. Diablo Education Association, says MDEA President Mike Noce.
“We were moving along and then the governor dropped his budget proposals down on us,” says Noce. “We have a lot of young teachers who gave up going into other professions so they could teach. It’s like getting kicked in the stomach.”
News media converged on the local education coalition event in San Jose on March 12 where KC Walsh, president of the Oak Grove Educators Association and a member of the NEA Board of Directors, warned the cuts will hurt California’s future high-tech workforce.
“Our Silicon Valley students didn’t create the $16 billion state budget deficit crisis and their education shouldn’t be sacrificed to solve it,” she told the media. “The gutting of school programs will hurt their chances of someday joining the high-tech workforce.”
In Solano County, first-grade teacher Christine Boatman is in her second year as a probationary teacher in Travis Unified and was pink-slipped. Her husband is in the Navy, stationed in Maine, so she is juggling care for their son, who turns three in May, and the demands of her classroom. Now this. “I was devastated,” she says. “I just finished getting my master’s and now I wonder how I’m going to pay all the bills.
“We all came into teaching because we really care about the kids. Now the state budget crisis can put an end to all of that for me. It really hurts me to know that so many students around the state are going to suffer as a result.”
