IRVINE : Authority to Lay Off Teachers to Be Asked

Irvine Unified School District board members will be asked tonight to approve laying off 65 teachers if need be to balance the 1993-94 budget.

School administrators will seek the layoff authorization in light of a projected budget deficit of up to $3.2 million, said Sue Long, deputy superintendent for personnel. If 65 of the district’s 1,004 teachers were laid off, the district would save about $2.2 million, Long said.

By law, the school district must notify teachers of an impending layoff by March 15. If the district misses that date, teachers may not be laid off until the following year.

If the school board approves the layoff procedure tonight, Long said, any affected teachers will receive a final layoff notice by May 15 and be out of a job at the end of the school year. Up until the end of the school year, she said, the school board will be able to stop all or some of the layoffs.

“If something changes and we magically find the money we need, then the board can take action to rescind the layoffs,” she said.

Never before has the district notified teachers of a possible layoff.

“We have enormous concerns about a district we consider already stretched very thin,” Long said. “This is not a move we considered lightly. But until we know what our financial position is, we want to provide the board with flexibility.”

Last year, the district laid off 200 non-teaching employees, mostly part-timers, in order to trim $1 million from the current budget.

Besides asking permission to begin the teacher layoff process, administrators will ask the board to adopt policies to determine which teachers would receive layoff notices.