PEGGY PEATTIE / Union-Tribune
Mark Mathewson, a fourth grade teacher at Baker Elementary School, held up a sign yesterday during the San Diego school board meeting.
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High school English teachers, counselors and librarians got an 11th-hour reprieve from layoffs in the San Diego school district yesterday when the superintendent asked trustees to exempt them from budget cuts.
Still, a divided school board voted to authorize 617 of the 903 pink slips that were issued in March.
Spared were 102 high school English teachers, 76 counselors and 15 librarians. An additional 93 layoff notices were rescinded, the result of a combination of circumstances, including miscalculations in retirement dates and errors in seniority rankings.
Superintendent Terry Grier has been consumed with the San Diego Unified School District's anticipated $80 million budget deficit since he started work in March. Grier has visited 22 schools, where students helped him decide to preserve high-priority positions.
“Of all the cuts, the kids repeatedly said don't cut our counselors,” he said. “It's not that other things are not important; this has to do with priorities.”
Saving counselors and English teachers is in sync with the board's goal of raising graduation rates, Grier said. He said it makes no sense to eliminate librarians after voters paid to build libraries with the 1998 Proposition MM bond measure.
The reduction in layoffs surprised the teachers union.
“It's a start,” said Camille Zombro, president of the San Diego Education Association. “But I'm confused. We've been told this is about numbers; now suddenly it's about priorities?”
School board President Katherine Nakamura and trustees John de Beck and Mitz Lee approved the layoffs. Luis Acle and Shelia Jackson opposed them. They said all teaching positions should be protected.
During the tense meeting, teachers and parents pleaded with trustees to reject layoffs.
“I know we call this a budget crisis, but I think it's more than that, I think it's a morality crisis,” said Guillermo Gomez, who will be laid off from Lincoln High School, where he teaches social justice.
The Center on Policy Initiatives, a San Diego nonprofit, also urged the board to reconsider the cuts. The organization offered several alternatives it said could save teaching jobs, including dipping into reserves and seeking flexibility in money allocated for specific uses.
Acle and Jackson said schools in low-income areas serving mostly minority children will be hit hardest. Some schools will lose half their teachers only to have them replaced with senior educators who may not want to work there.
One such school, Jackson Elementary, was poised to lose 22 of 24 teachers. But 21 teachers have been exempted from the cuts because of a recording error in their seniority ranking.
Jackson teachers have helped turn the once-low-rated school into an award-winning campus.
An administrative law judge ruled that the Jackson teachers and some others had one day's more seniority than district records indicated, giving them enough ranking to avoid layoffs.
The district's $80 million in cuts to its $1.2 billion budget is in response to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed reduction to education spending. Schwarzenegger is scheduled to issue a revised budget today with an updated deficit.
The district would rescind teacher layoffs and other cuts should the state budget turn out better than expected. But many say the state could be without a budget when school starts in September.
San Diego administrators will look for deeper cuts to make up for the 286 teachers spared from layoffs. That could include using reserves and closing schools with low enrollments, Grier said.
Maureen Magee: (619) 293-1369; maureen.magee@uniontrib.com
