Schools to Send Layoff Notices for ‘Flexibility’

Girding for what is shaping up as its tightest budget year ever, the Los Angeles Board of Education on Monday authorized school district officials to send layoff notices to more than 2,100 teachers, counselors, school health workers and librarians.

While district officials expect many--if not most--of the notices to be rescinded by the time the board decides on its 1991-92 budget early this summer, Supt. Bill Anton said the notices are needed to give the board the “flexibility” it needs for the $200 million to $250 million in cuts it expects to face in the coming fiscal year because of tightening state funding.

State law requires that permanent employees with teaching or other credentials be notified by March 15; otherwise they cannot be laid off or demoted in the next budget year, which begins July 1.

The move threatened the delicate, new-found peace between district administrators and United Teachers-Los Angeles, whose president blasted the layoff notices plan as a “knee-jerk” reaction that would inflict unnecessary suffering on the recipients.

Also Monday, the board pared $88 million to keep its current-year budget of about $3.8 billion from going into the red. To do so, it drained its $31.5-million reserve fund (which will have to be restored next year), allowed the superintendent to tap money saved in a spending freeze and offered a one-time, $15,000 bonus to teachers who volunteer to retire early.

Among other steps, the board took $5 million that had been earmarked for overcrowded schools on year-round operation. That move was criticized by parent Yvonne Lovato, who said she believed it signaled that the “worst cutbacks will be in the poorest schools.”

The $88 million comes on top of approximately $220 million in cuts the board made last summer, at the beginning of the 1990-91 school year. At that time district officials said the cuts were the most dramatic required since 1978, the year California voters passed Proposition 13, which slashed property taxes and forced the state to provide most of the schools’ money.

Things are expected to be worse this year, however. With the state in a declining economy and facing a deficit of up to $10 billion, Gov. Pete Wilson has proposed sharp cuts in schools and other services.

Anton said layoff notices will go out in the next few days to teachers with the least seniority in certain secondary subjects--including 319 in physical education, 124 in reading and 391 in social studies. Notices also will be sent to all reading, vocational education and elementary music teachers and approximately half of the lowest-seniority counselors, librarians, school psychologists and other “support services” fields.

The district does not anticipate any layoffs of secondary math, physical science or English-as-a-second-language teachers and probably will end up hiring more in these areas, as well as bilingual and special education teachers, Anton said.

None of the layoffs will take place unless the Board of Education authorizes the cuts during its budget deliberations in early summer.

Ironically, the budget woes may count even board President Jackie Goldberg among the victims. She has applied to teach social studies and reading after she leaves the board in July, but both of those fields are targeted for cutbacks. District officials said they have made no decision on her application, and she abstained from the discussion and vote on those subject area cuts.

Board member Julie Korenstein cast the only no vote.

UTLA President Helen Bernstein, at a news conference earlier Monday, denounced the layoff notices. She criticized Anton for not giving the teachers’ union more notice of the plan so it could better prepare its members.

“None of this was well thought out,” Bernstein said. “The district has to learn to be more creative” in approaching its budget problems.

Noting that the board has sent out similar notices to teachers in other years only to rescind them all later, she criticized the district for causing unneeded “terror” and emotional anguish.

Anton acknowledged that the mass layoff notices will be seen as “hurtful” and “unkind.” He said his “gut instinct tells me it is the very opposite of what our students, our parents, our teachers and our support people need to make education work better in Los Angeles.”

But the superintendent said the notices are necessary to “preserve the greatest degree of flexibility for the district as we make the difficult budget decisions in the coming months.”

As most of the district’s budget is spent on salaries and benefits, Anton predicted there will be at least some layoffs of teachers and other credentialed employees in the next budget year.

Meanwhile, Anton said, Los Angeles is joining 16 other school districts in the state, representing 82% of California students, in an intensive lobbying effort to get better funding from Sacramento.