Bloodletting Continues as LBUSD Begins Issuing 1,186 Layoff Notices This Week

The city’s largest workforce began receiving an expected 1,186 layoff notices this week as Long Beach Unified School District met legal requirements to inform employees that their jobs may be gone in June.

As Long Beach’s largest employer with about 8,000 employees, the district’s reduced spending due to the state’s financial rupture will bleed into every neighborhood, from property values linked to school test scores to the blow of that sizable block of shoppers having far less to spend. The district estimates that up to 1,000 of the expected 1,200 layoff notices are going to classroom teachers, who will be told in one-on-one meetings by principals that began Monday.

The district has about 4,000 teachers. Noticing 20 percent to 25 percent of them of a potential layoff will thrust teachers into months of uncertainty as the fraught process of layoff hearings begins. Those teachers with most seniority, which the hearings help to establish, may lose their current position but would have priority to “bump” out a less senior district teacher.

This means a significant shuffling of personnel, at best, as some staff retire or resign, and others are potentially uprooted from their current workplace, which is decided based on their length of service. LBUSD has 100 schools. The final layoff number won’t be known for months but will almost certainly be lower than the number of notices sent.

Still, the district anticipates needing to potentially cut $150 million out of a $700-million annual budget, if state funding continues to crater amid California’s financial peril and looming deficit—and if Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed state extension of current income and sales taxes is not approved by voters in a June special election. The best-case scenario for the district is still grim: $50 million to $60 million in anticpated spending cuts. The governor also continues to lobby for statewide elimination of redevelopment agencies, which Long Beach and Los Angeles mayors and most city governments oppose. Brown argues that it would recover an estimated $1 billion for education.

At the Long Beach Board of Education meeting on Tuesday night, the school board voted to cut another roughly $7.8 million from mostly central office operations that include research, informational technology (websites), and three dozen more staff cuts in the maintenance staff, which is a broad category including various trades, which the district clarified from Patch’s earlier story that called these janitorial.

At their last meeting, last month, the school board (which oversees the district and its 86,000 students) voted to cut the budget for high school grad requirements for computer competency courses, as well as health and the community service program. Tuesday night’s vote eliminated the requirement for the programs that are no longer funded. The new, relatively modest reduction in total class units required for graduation will impact the high school graduating class of 2015.

“These programs are not mandated by the state, but Long Beach approved the community service requirement in 2003 and it became effective in 2007 as a form of character education,” said LBUSD spokesperson Chris Eftychiou. “Community service is also a way to get students real world experiences outside the classroom.”

Nothing changes for those students currently earning community service credit as a requirement of their graduation, Eftychiou added.