Losing a Teacher : Pupils Share Pain as Funding Formula Forces Reassignments

Karen Park has gently shepherded her kindergarten pupils through their first weeks of school, showing them the wonders of modeling clay and easel-painting, leading them in songs and reading them stories, praising their drawings and crooked renditions of the alphabet.

She dotes on them and they clearly adore her.

But today will be Park’s last day at Toland Way Elementary in Highland Park. For lack of a dozen students, the school has to let one of its teachers go, then adjust class rosters to conform to student-teacher ratios mandated by district officials.

Though she has taught at the school for three years, Park is its least senior teacher under district guidelines, so she has been reassigned to a kindergarten class at nearby Yorkdale Elementary.

Her young students at Toland Way will be handed off to another teacher, and that teacher’s current class will be dispersed, its students farmed out to other classrooms.

This shuffling of children and teachers is an annual ritual on campuses throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District and in most large public school systems, which base teacher allocations on the number of students enrolled in a school.

Because public schools do not know how many students will show up, and because students trickle in for weeks, most districts wait a month or so to determine enrollment. Then they calculate how many teachers each school is entitled to receive based on that “norm day” tally. Today is norm day in the Los Angeles district.

Teachers are added or dropped and some students’ classroom assignments adjusted. It is often a confusing and disruptive process.

In Los Angeles, approximately 50 permanent teachers have already been forced to change schools and as many as 100 more are likely to be displaced in the next few weeks, either sent to different schools or to work as substitutes.

“Sometimes you have to totally reorganize and move children all over, and that can be a nightmare,” said Joyce Wroten, principal at Kenter Canyon Elementary, which must make only a handful of changes.

Schools are alloted teachers each spring, based on enrollment projections that take into account birthrates, the number of students expected to return, neighborhood growth and space needed for bused-in students. Each school is alloted one teacher per class, with class sizes ranging from 29 to 40, depending on the school and grade level.

In elementary schools, reorganizing classes is fairly straightforward, though often painful because many children have bonded with their teachers and classmates by the time the changes occur.

“You try to let the parents know it’s coming--’We will reorganize, there will be some changes’--but it still hits some fairly hard when their children are the ones who (have to) move,” said Wroten.

“We tell the students over and over, ‘Some of you will be changing classes, but that’s OK. We are all still part of the same family.’ They need to know that ‘This teacher didn’t kick me out of the room,’ that we’re not doing this to be mean,” she said.

“Still they’re being uprooted and some of them are traumatized. There are usually tears on the first day, but you go back in those (new) classes the second day and you don’t even know which ones have moved.”

In the junior and senior highs, the changes pose more logistical headaches, as principals and counselors juggle class schedules. “If you have 1,000 kids at your school and they each have six periods, that means you have 6,000 class periods to schedule,” said John D. Gaydowski, principal of Paul Revere Middle School.

This year, the typical norm day maneuvering was made even more complicated by the school board’s decision to increase class size to save money, cutting the number of teachers each school requires.

Most of the positions lost through the cuts have been absorbed by not rehiring almost 2,000 teachers who worked for the district last year on temporary contracts. Many of those teachers have staffed classrooms as substitutes since school began last month, but most will be pulled from their schools and replaced by permanent teachers cut this week.

The class size increase hit elementary schools especially hard because the board decision came less than a week before school was to open, after principals had already hired enough teachers to staff classes set up under the old student-teacher ratio.

Some schools unexpectedly grew enough to keep all their teachers. Others were able to pare their staffs with little disruption.

Days before school opened in Los Angeles last month, Huntington Drive Elementary Principal Michael Martin called the new teacher he had hired from the Fullerton school district to tell her he had no job for her after all. She stayed in Fullerton, where the start of classes was still three weeks away. Still, Martin had to split up a first-grade class when he wound up one teacher over his allotment.

Toland Way’s Park is also a victim of that class size increase. Principal Alice McDonald had hired an extra teacher under the old class size guidelines. When the ratio changed, she wound up with one teacher too many. But because the new teacher is bilingual and teaches Spanish-speaking children at the school, she is protected under district rules from displacement.

So Park--a teacher who came in on weekends to paint her classroom wall, who lined its shelves with books, toys and games she paid for herself, who sanded the bookcases and tables so splinters wouldn’t catch the hands of her young charges--was let go.

“We hate to lose Karen; she’s an excellent teacher,” McDonald said. “It’s a painful thing . . . especially when I’m sure we’re going to grow as the year goes on and be able to get a teacher back.”

Park has the right to return if the school’s enrollment goes up, but she can hardly bear the prospect of being uprooted again, and the thought of putting her new class through what her current class is feeling brings tears to her eyes.

“I spent most of the morning crying,” Park said Thursday, when she learned that her move had been decided on. “How do you explain decisions like these to little children?”

The parents of Park’s students are wondering as well.

When Katie Essick’s daughter Eden learned last Friday that her teacher might be leaving, “she burst into tears and she couldn’t stop crying,” Essick said.

“I told her sometimes things like this just happen, but she still thinks we’re going to fix it so her teacher can stay.”

Essick and her husband have pleaded Park’s case to top district officials and the school board, asking that the school be given longer to get the 12 students it needs to warrant an additional teacher.

District officials say Park’s plight is unfortunate, but the district cannot afford to carry extra teachers in these tight fiscal times.

“It’s all dollars and numbers to (district officials),” Essick said through her own tears. “It’s not people, it’s not parents who care, it’s not children who love their teachers, it’s not teachers who love their children. It’s just balancing the numbers.”