School district cuts teachers, books

School administrators, led by Tulita principal Danielle Allphin, presented a $20,000 check to the Redondo Beach Education Foundation’s Save Our Schools campaign. The check represented a day’s salary from each of the participating administrators. Photo

Parents and teachers filled the boardroom at Redondo Beach Unified School District headquarters Tuesday night in hopes of saving jobs and books. But the school board, facing a $3.6 million budget deficit, reluctantly passed a budget that includes the layoffs of 16 teachers and the elimination of a popular language arts workbook.

School board president Drew Gamet, himself a teacher, expressed deep remorse.

“You try to stay level as a leader in the community, but at the same time you are a parent, and I have a daughter going into third grade next year and this is just killing me,” Gamet said. “It is killing all of us…The kind of decisions we have to make are horrific.”

The district has faced three straight years of steep cuts due to a reduction in state educational funding. Chief business official Janet Redella noted at one point that the Average Daily Attendance funding – the mechanism by which the state funds schools – has dropped from $6,148 per student per year in 2007-2008 to $5,206 per student this year. The district has lost a total of $9 million in funding from a budget that was once $65 million.

According to the National Education Association, California now ranks 46th in the nation in per pupil educational funding and 49th in teacher-student ratios.

Several teachers implored the board to find a way to save a kindergarten through fifth grade series of Houghton Mifflin language arts workbooks. Many held signs that read “Save Our Teachers & Books.” The books – known as “consumable workbooks” because they are used by students to practice writing and are therefore not reusable – cost $80,000 each year.

Amy Santa Cruz, the president of the Redondo Beach Teachers Association and a kindergarten teacher at Madison Elementary, said the loss of the workbooks could impact the academic progress the district has made in standardized test scores.

“By suggesting we take away workbooks and hand out blank pages to little children to do an overhead, it’s really going to be stressful on those kids,” Santa Cruz said. “You may be saving dollars now, but what you are going to save later in terms of the extra help those kids are going to need because they are not doing as well as they could be doing.”

Parras Middle School teacher Janet Barker said that after five years of using the workbooks, students are arriving at middle school with much better writing skills.

“Think about it – when was the last time you’ve seen a group of teachers campaign to keep a workbook series?” Barker said. “I can assure you they are not Houghton Mifflin stockholders. As public servants, teachers are a dedicated, frugal lot who live and breathe with the best interests of our students in mind. Tonight’s message is simple: the workbooks work. Don’t take this valuable tool away.”

Others spoke passionately about some of the 16 teachers who have received pink slips. Alta Vista 4th grade teacher Amanda Steinacher said she was on the panel that interviewed two of her colleagues at the elementary school – Tanaz Farad and Stephanie Benas – who are now slated for layoffs. They were chosen among 200 applicants two years ago, she said, and are now educational leaders and an integral part of the school’s mission.

“My personal request is you work this summer to do anything possible to save them,” Steinacher said. “They are absolutely the very best of RBUSD. I am fabulous, but they are way better.”

Parent Mary Claire Scanlon questioned why the school district had not saved money by implementing furlough days in order to save both teachers and the workbooks.

“We don’t understand why other districts have been able to come to agreement with their teachers and actually give the teachers more furlough days…” she said. “I am a taxpayer and I am a parent and I don’t know a lot about how you guys are negotiating. We have made our contribution to the Redondo Beach Education Foundation, and I will say, in the private sector we have taken our cuts. We in Redondo have been so blessed to have these teachers and we need to support that.”

The RBEF has recently launched an extension of its “Club 360” campaign, which raised $208,000 earlier this year, specifically allocated to save teachers jobs. The new campaign is called Save Our Schools (SOS) and the hope is to raise as much as $960,000 to bring all 16 teachers back.

A group of administrators made a $20,000 presentation to the Education Foundation at Tuesday’s meeting. Each gave a day’s salary to help kick-start the campaign.

“We have a profound interest in shielding the children in our district from the effects of this state budget crisis,” said Danielle Allphin, the principal of Tulita Elementary. “No single factor in a child’s education of future success is more important than a caring teacher, and everybody in this room shoulders the burden to help retain our teachers…Even with the significant savings and cuts we have made throughout the district, we are forced to send compassionate, caring teachers out the door this summer in a state that has 12 percent unemployment at this time. Help needs to come from within, from our own families.”

School board member Arlene Staich expressed frustration that the teachers associations have not agreed to furlough days. She said two furlough days would save $440,000, or the equivalent of eight teaching positions.

“I am so proud of our administrators for donating this money,” Staich said. “But all of us have to work together. We are not hiding any money. It’s not there.”

Staich, who taught for 30 years, choked with emotion and openly wept as she spoke.

“One of the things I saw was save our teachers,” she said, referring to the signs. “But I am confused. If you want to save your colleagues, why aren’t you doing anything to help us? That is my very concern. I have no idea. And as a former teacher, I would definitely have done what I could to save those, as I hear, excellent, excellent teachers. And it grieves me quite a bit to have to say this to you, but I think everyone, the Ed Foundation is trying, our admistration is trying, but we don’t have the money.”

Santa Cruz suggested that both books and teachers could be saved with the combination of early retirement savings realized through more teachers accepting the incentive package and the district tapping more deeply into its reserves.

But board member Jane Diehl said the district is already deficit spending by $345,000 and will only be $257,000 above the state-mandated three percent economic uncertainty reserve. She said that the county has in the past required unexpected payments of up to $500,000 and that the district needed to keep its reserves above three percent simply to remain solvent.

“So with that said, it is wise for us to have money for those rainy days,” Diehl said. “If we go down to the bare minimum and a rainy day comes, we are in even deeper trouble than we are already in.”

Board members said that the language arts workbooks, at $80,000, represent enough savings to save a teachers job.

“If it’s going to be a choice between making a decision on something that isn’t absolutely necessary and saving someone’s job, I am going to save someone’s job,” said board member Todd Loewenstein. “I think that is more important, and I think most people would make that decision.”

Gamet said when he looks back he remembers his teachers, not his books.

“I remember Ms. Dunn, Ms. Davenport, Ms. Berkenshire, Mr. Lee, and Mr. Morgan,” he said. “That is who I remember – I remember my teachers. I don’t really remember my books. The teachers that completely shaped everything that was happening and sent me forward in this world. It is really going to take everyone, absolutely everyone, to try and salvage this as best we can, because at this point we are in salvage mode.” ER


Comments:

comments so far. Comments posted to EasyReaderNews.com may be reprinted in the Easy Reader print edition, which is published each Thursday.