David Feldman teaches in the Los Angeles Unified School
District.
On Feb. 15, the Los Angeles School Board approved the
issuing of 5,000 layoff notices to district employees, with 4,500 of the pink
slips going to teachers. Budget cuts in LA Unified would total $408 million,
with the state budget picture unclear for several months.
Local media have deemed the proposals a “doomsday budget,”
with announcement of the budget situation bringing stress to thousands of
workers who are employed by the Los Angeles Unified School District.
“Getting a pink slip last year was one of the most trying
and stressful times in my life,” Jesus Landazuri, an LAUSD teacher told
Liberation News. Landazuri was forced to sit through a drawn out process, in
which district lawyers and union lawyers fought over whose jobs could be saved
and who was “expendable.”
Hundreds of teachers experienced this uncertainty last
year, when yet again 5,000 layoff notices were sent out to district employees.
Due to resistance from several public employee unions that
represent LAUSD workers, such as the Teamsters and United Teachers Los Angeles,
the number of lay offs was only in the hundreds. However, unions also made
concessions and workers were given pay cuts and furlough days. Furloughs are
days in which students lose an instructional day, and teachers and other
district employees lose a day of pay.
District employees endured seven furlough days this school year.
Vital services for students in danger
LAUSD is the biggest employer in the city of Los Angeles.
If the cuts go through and class sizes are increased, nurses, school
psychologists and school librarians would be laid off in huge numbers. Art, physical
education, music and foreign language departments would be decimated. Hundreds
of thousands of students’ lives and education would be adversely affected.
In LAUSD, 179 school libraries have been closed and are
now being operated by volunteers. “This is a clear violation of the law,” said
Melinda Buterbaugh, chairwomen of the Library Workers Committee of UTLA. “The district only funds libraries at the
high school level, middle schools and elementary schools are forced to pay for
library out of their own funds.”
LAUSD is also looking to slash health benefits for
employees. For several years, workers in LAUSD have refrained from fighting for
rightfully earned cost of living raises so as to guarantee their current level
of health benefits. The 12 public employee unions in LA Unified have amassed
$200 million to offset the rising cost of benefits; a panel of labor leaders
oversees the money.
The incoming superintendent of LA schools, John Deasy,
wants to raid this money now. This would nullify an agreement between the
unions and the district that LAUSD is to provide for health benefits. The money
is going to be needed sooner or later to compensate for the increasing costs of
health care.
LAUSD is currently sitting on $100 million of funding from
the federal government that was intended to save jobs. However, the district
has not used this money, claiming they are supposedly “saving money” for next
school year. Yet once again, they are demanding more concessions from workers.
To add insult to injury, Deasy, who is to take office as
superintendent on April 15 of this year, will be getting an $80,000-a-year
salary raise over that of his predecessor, Ramon Cortines. Deasy will be
earning a ridiculous $330,000 a year.
Deasy is a proud proponent of charter schools and the
privatizing anti-union agenda currently infecting public education throughout
the country. Because of a recent lawsuit brought against teacher tenure,
teachers who have seniority and have worked in LAUSD as far back as 2001 could
receive pink slips this year.
Let us follow the example of our brothers and sisters in
Wisconsin and take to the streets. The time for concessions is over. The time
to fight is now.
