by Laura Garber
School districts across California are bracing for mass layoffs. The Los Angeles Unified School District issued 3,200 pink slips, Sacramento City Unified 800, and Long Beach Unified 515 to teachers alone. But the Hermosa Beach City School District has no such plans.
“We’re not laying off anyone,” said 12-year HBUSD board member Maggie Bove-LaMonica. “We’ve just been really careful looking at enrollment.”
The strategy is simple: never use one-time money to hire people.
“One-time money isn’t meant to buy people, because that money goes away and then you can’t build off of that,” Bove-LaMonica said. “We usually invested in technology for a specific tailored program or service, but not people that we would eventually have to fire.”
The COVID crisis infused school districts nationwide with a lot of one-time monies. California school districts received roughly $33.5 billion in federal pandemic aid across three rounds of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding. Many districts used those dollars on staff, in some cases to address learning loss, mental health needs, or chronic understaffing that predated the pandemic. When the money expired, districts were left with recurring salary obligations and no recurring revenue to cover them. Exacerbating this funding discrepancy, school districts’ required contributions to the state’s two pension systems have risen sharply over the past decade. Employer contributions to CalSTRS, the teacher retirement system, climbed from 8.25% of payroll in 2013-14 to 19.1% in 2025-26. CalPERS rates for classified school employees rose from roughly 11% to nearly 27% over the same period.
Many districts have emerged from this combination of fiscal turbulence and rising costs seemingly unprepared for its consequences.
“A lot of districts have played super fast with their budgets over the past decade,” Bove-LaMonica said. “And a lot of people gambled on that.”
Hermosa didn’t. Though at roughly 1,450 students, the district also faces fewer of the structural pressures bearing down on its larger counterparts. LAUSD enrolls more than 400,000 students; Long Beach Unified about 62,000. Both have seen enrollment fall sharply since 2019, shrinking their per-student state funding even as fixed costs have climbed. Hermosa’s enrollment has held comparatively steady.
Instead, one-time funds went toward things like I-Ready, a diagnostic assessment tool that gives teachers real-time data on student progress, as opposed to waiting for annual state test results that don’t come back until October, the following academic year.
Another priority for the district is careful hiring, ensuring staff members are adaptable and versatile. This starts at the top.
“Our superintendent is our HR, maintenance and operations, in addition to instruction,” Bove-LaMonica said.
The nine non-renewal notices, or pink-slips, issued in closed session at the March 11 board meeting were routine probationary contract actions, not budget-driven layoffs, Bove-LaMonica said.
Alongside budget solutions, HBUSD recently approved changes to accommodate student spacing issues. Two portable classroom buildings, purchased from Long Beach Unified School District at $1 per building, will be installed at Hermosa View Elementary School. Refurbishment, transportation and installation through Silver Creek Industries will cost $156,422, funded through Measure HV.
The portables address what Bove-LaMonica called a “bottleneck” years in the making. When neighbors of Hermosa Vista filed a lawsuit over traffic and parking impacts from the district’s school pathway design, the district restructured its grade flow, concentrating younger students at Hermosa View. That left one classroom at View divided up to provide occupational therapy and other special education services the district is legally required to offer.
“We want to be able to fully use every classroom that we have because there’s size constraints off of student to teacher to classroom size ratios,” Bove-LaMonica said. “And one of our classrooms at View is currently being divided up to do special resources.”
Hermosa View will use the portables for special resource uses. “That will allow us to regain full use of the classroom,” Bove-LaMonica said. “It’s so silly, but getting creative is necessary.” ER
