Most Pink Slips Rescinded, but Teachers Still Aren’t Happy

As the school term began last week, all but an estimated 2,000 of the 30,000 California public schoolteachers previously facing layoffs were back in the classroom.

But their relief that most of the pink slips have been rescinded does not fully erase the pain of the budget cycle, teachers say.

For example, Jan Forni was among 38 teachers in the Cotati-Rohnert Park Unified School District, north of San Francisco, who were laid off over the summer. Last month, she was offered her job back because the state’s final budget turned out to be less devastating to education than school districts had feared.

“I was all packed,” said Forni, 45, and she had gone through the emotional letting go of the school. “It was really hard.”

When her principal entered her classroom and told her she could keep her job, Forni said, she walked out to the playground and cried. Then she turned him down.

Instead, she decided to take a job at another school within the district, where she would have more seniority and be less likely to be laid off again.

The experience took its toll on her family, Forni said. They didn’t take a summer vacation, her two children in college didn’t know if they would return for the fall semester because of financial constraints and Forni enrolled in real estate courses as a fallback career.

“It was like a summer of emotional roller coasters,” she said

The same down and up was felt all over the state.

The Oakland, Oceanside, Pasadena, Riverside and Santa Monica school districts offered back jobs to almost all of the employees they laid off in May. Other districts, such as Glendale and San Diego, avoided layoffs and rescinded all of the pink-slip warnings they had sent out in March.

District officials said they were able to back off on layoffs because the state budget signed by Gov. Gray Davis in early August cut spending for kindergarten through 12th grade by about $2 billion, but not as deeply as earlier versions of the spending plan. Still, education will continue to consume by far the largest share of the state’s general fund -- $28 billion of $71 billion this year.

Some districts found other ways to trim spending, such as increasing class sizes and reducing administrative offices, while others were able to hire back teachers because of attrition.

The Santa Monica Unified School District avoided laying off more than 100 employees after voters approved a $6.2-million parcel tax in June to help fill the district’s $13-million budget gap.

Barbara Kerr, president of the California Teachers Assn., said fewer than 2,000 of the 30,000 teachers who received pink slips by May were laid off.

She contends that many of the now abandoned decisions for major layoffs were made out of panic last spring or just to be “mean and spiteful.”

Some of those 2,000 have refused to return, even when they were offered their jobs back, Kerr said, while others decided to leave the profession altogether because they thought that they had been treated without respect.

The San Francisco Unified School District sent out 272 teacher layoff notices, and recalled 206 of them. But of those 206 who were re-offered their jobs, 51 chose not to return for “various reasons,” according to district officials.

“We will never get them back,” Kerr said. “Some said, ‘Oh my gosh, this isn’t what I expected. This isn’t how I expected to be treated.’ And now they’re gone.”

But Kenneth Epstein, a spokesman for the Oakland Unified School District, said schools tried to act responsibly by warning teachers early. Oakland sent out about 340 layoff warnings and later rescinded them all.

“If you don’t know if you have the money to pay for these people, you have to lay them off,” he said. “It looks irrational from the outside, but the constrictions we’re operating with give us no choice.”

Glenn King, superintendent of human resources for the Riverside Unified School District, said nearly 300 layoff notices had been sent to teachers and administrators, but all had been offered their jobs back, except one nurse. “Districts had to be prudent and prepare for the worst,” he said. “We were relieved. We spend a lot of time and effort recruiting these wonderful teachers, and we certainly didn’t want to lay them off.”

Katherine Hurley, 36, a teaching specialist at Dunsmore Elementary School in the Glendale Unified School District, received a layoff notice. But last week she was back at Dunsmore for the beginning of the new school year, with a change: Instead of working there full time, she will rotate among Dunsmore and two other Glendale schools. “I’m very happy that I’m still with this district,” she said. “It’s a great district and I’m pleased.”

Glendale Unified issued 45 layoff notices last spring, but was able to restore those positions because of retirements and other savings, said district spokesman Vic Pallos. But next year, with an even gloomier budget forecast, teachers may not be so fortunate, he said. “This coming year ... you’re going to find districts really wrestling with numbers,” Pallos said. “It’s going to be a much bigger challenge and a much bigger issue to be able to retain all of our teachers.”