Compton : School District Announces Teacher Layoffs, Other Cuts

Sixteen non-tenured teachers learned this week that they will lose their jobs Friday as a result of budget cuts in the Compton Unified School District. The school board released the teachers’ names at a meeting Tuesday.

The board voted last month to cut more than 100 jobs in the district to help trim about $4.9 million from the district’s $88-million budget.

In another part of the cost-cutting plan, the board Tuesday eliminated the jobs of 20 administrators, effective immediately. Most have the right to move to lower-level and lower-paying positions, Supt. J. L. Handy said. The move is likely to result in some layoffs, however, for administrators who don’t qualify for other positions or for workers with less seniority who are bumped from jobs by the administrators.

About 60 other non-teaching employees, such as clerks and maintenance workers, will also be laid off after the district determines which employees have the most seniority, Handy said.

Meanwhile, the teachers union filed suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court this week to halt the teacher layoffs, said Joyce Brooks, executive director of the Compton Education Assn. Union leaders said the layoffs are illegal because the district missed state-mandated deadlines for issuing layoff notices.

Nearly all other financially struggling school districts issued layoff notices by mid-March. Compton administrators said they did not realize that layoffs would be necessary until the county recently rejected the school system’s spending plan. In September, Compton Unified agreed to cut its budget after county officials pointed out millions of dollars in miscalculations in the spending plan.