Long Beach school district issues pink slips to hundreds of teachers

The Long Beach Board of Education has voted to lay off 243 employees -- most of them teachers -- at the end of the school year to cut costs.

School district officials say the cuts will likely be the first of several rounds of teacher layoffs that could bleed schools of more than 800 workers.

Chris Eftychiou, a spokesman of the Long Beach Unified School District, said the five-person school board will consider issuing more pink slips in the coming weeks.

The cuts approved Tuesday are part of an effort to cut $90 million from the district’s budget over the next two fiscal years. 

He blamed the layoffs on the state, which provides the school district with 85% of its funding.

“This is a direct result to the state’s ongoing cuts to public schools,” Eftychiou said. “This has forced school districts to make deep cuts that will change how our schools look next year.”

Eftychiou said the district has stripped $100 million from its budget over the last five years, leaving it with an annual operating budget of $715 million.

In March, the district warned about 1,000 teachers, counselors and social workers that they could be laid off at the end of the school year. That number was later reduced to 849. Some of the teachers who received pink slips have requested hearings with the district to protest their layoffs.  

Long Beach teachers picketed outside of Tuesday's board's meeting. Michael Day, president of the Teachers Association of Long Beach, called the cuts "excessive and cruel."

-- Kate Linthicum

Comments

[Jim]

Thiese types of layoffs are just the start of what teabaggers profess to want. Small to no government.
Welcome, America, to the third world.

[clintorris]

How about cutting title one schools first. Or is that another entitlement the illegals demand?

[Sharon]

They really need to stop saying they are cutting the schools' budgets. The schools are not getting less money, they just aren't getting the increases they want. And then they terrify the public by laying off teachers. The real cuts need to be made in administration, but this will never happen because no one will care and they won't get the increases they want. Wake up people, they just want more and more of your money and they waste most of it. I know this from personal experience - used to work for a maintenance dept for a So Cal school district. Every year they would buy things not needed like air conditioners and warehouse them so their budgets didn't get cut.

[ARD]

It is simply an outrage that leaders in Sacramento continue undermine the local efforts of communities to educate their children, with the Long Beach USD being the latest group to fall victim to a narcissistic and dangerous state legislature in what will prove to be a domino effect of tumbling school districts in the months to come. In addition, it is an outrage how our defensive leaders continue to fuel a media-driven campaign to blame teachers for schools that fail. Schools fail because they are starved for money due to decisions made by our elected officials. In the past handful of years, Sacramento has cut funding for k-12 education in the state by 17 BILLION DOLLARS, and when questioned about their lack of support for our most precious resource - our schools and children - they squeal like stuck pigs and point fingers at local districts failing to do their jobs. In an effort to defer blame, they grandstand by threatening to end tenure for teachers when Sacramento-generated layoffs cause some schools to lose big chunks of their new teacher staffs. They threaten to tie tests scores arbitrarily to teacher evaluations “because, dagumit, they want their monies' worth out of those lazy teachers.“ Of course, what they fail to highlight is the ongoing de facto hunger strike they forced school districts to endure - a crisis that has resulted in less-than-savory conditions at countless schools across the state. In addition, what they fail to reveal is that teachers in their eyes - being the well-educated frontline foot soldiers on the increasingly-challenging public school battlefield of today - are nuisances that have the gumption to actually suggest to them how schools should be operated, and as such a nuisance, need to be silenced with new anti-teacher regulation. Although I am outraged by the behavior of our elected officials regarding these pivotal societal issues, my real outrage is reserved for an apathetic public that will actually repeat the public education sound bites coming out of the capital in an effort to sound well-informed. Most of us cannot throw a rock without hitting someone involved in public education in some realm. Ask the people that work in the schools what their thoughts are. Often, their beliefs run firmly counter to the beliefs in Sacramento. Something is dreadfully amiss here. Whose in charge – these decisions to savage our schools will haunt California in ways unimaginable for decades to come.