Sacramento area districts will lay off fewer teachers than planned

When Sacramento area school districts send pink slips out this week, they'll be laying off fewer teachers than they predicted they would earlier this year.

Thursday is the deadline for California school districts to finalize the preliminary layoffs they issued in March. Back then, it looked like 600 teachers in Sacramento County – and about 15,000 statewide – would be losing their jobs at the end of the school year.

Final numbers are still being determined, but the tally now appears to be much lower. Elk Grove Unified issued 137 preliminary notices in March; 51 teachers will get pink slips this week. Folsom Cordova Unified told 156 teachers in March they might be laid off; about 40 will get final notices this week. San Juan Unified reduced its layoff list from 126 teachers to four.

So what's going on?

Local school district administrators said they've been able to scale back the number of layoffs by making other cuts, encouraging older teachers to retire or dipping into reserve funds.

"We've made the decision that we're going to use some of those reserves and protect the jobs and the services to students and families," said Trent Allen, a spokesman for San Juan.

Sacramento City Unified offered a retirement incentive that 190 teachers have accepted. Even though the district is laying off 175 teachers this week, administrators are hoping to bring them back to replace some of the retirees. That would save about $1.8 million, said Deputy Superintendent Tom Barentson, because the laid-off teachers are mostly at the bottom of the pay scale, while the retirees are at the top.

Even if the number of teachers laid off is smaller than originally expected, many children are likely to feel the impact: Fewer teachers means larger classes.

Elk Grove Unified decided to keep kindergarten teachers who were previously on the chopping block. But high school students will feel the pinch. With layoffs concentrated at the secondary level, Elk Grove's ninth-grade math and English classes will have 35 students instead of 20, said spokeswoman Elizabeth Graswich.

In Folsom Cordova, third-grade classrooms will have 30 students instead of 20, sixth grades will rise from 30 kids to 32 or 34, and high school classes will have 35 students instead of 30, said Deputy Superintendent Debbie Bettencourt.

She said the district is hoping to bring back most of the 40 teachers getting pink slips, once the Legislature approves a budget for next year.

"It's unfortunate that we have to do our budget before the state does their budget," Bettencourt said. "It forces us to act on information we don't yet have."

School districts are laying off teachers with no more information about the state budget than they had in March, when they sent out the preliminary layoff notices. At that time, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had proposed cutting $4 billion from the public school system to help close a $14 billion budget gap.

More recently he's said the deficit could be as high as $20 billion for the fiscal year that begins July 1. Schwarzenegger will present his revised budget proposal on Wednesday – a day before districts must finalize the number of teachers they'll lay off.

The governor's budget revision "will really be the signal of whether the hooting and hollering of the last several months has made a difference," said David Gordon, superintendent of Sacramento County schools.

And there's been plenty of "hooting and hollering." The state teachers unions and their coalition of education groups have launched a massive publicity campaign against the governor's budget proposal. There's been a statewide bus tour, a "Cuts Hurt" theme song and publicity stunts including Bay Area students standing in trash cans to illustrate that the budget cuts would trash education.

On Friday, the Education Coalition held a news conference to talk about what it called "teacher poaching" by other states. Texas, Nevada and Hawaii have been advertising their teaching jobs on billboards, newspapers and Web sites in California. Some states are sending recruiters here to lure teachers who are losing their jobs.

"An intellectual brain drain is certainly going to happen," said Dennis Smith of the California Federation of Teachers.

But no one's making any bets on how big a threat the recruitment really poses to California schools – nor on how many teachers across the state will actually lose their jobs.

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