225 Teachers Across Valley Lose Positions (CA)

May 17, 2010

About 225 teachers in the Coachella Valley will receive final notices by today that they have been laid off.

Among them is third-grade teacher Karen DeNovi, who received her final layoff notice just one day before being honored as a teacher of the year by the Riverside County Office of Education.

“I personally will get through this,” said DeNovi, who has been teaching for 13 years but has received three layoff notices during three of her four years at Desert Sands Unified School District.

“Honestly, I think of these kids and how hard our staffs worked to get them to where they are now,” said DeNovi, one of nine teachers to receive a final layoff notice at Martin Van Buren Elementary in Indio.

In addition to the 225 teachers who have been laid off, another 210 retired from the three local school districts, in part because of incentives given to long-term employees by districts seeking to limit layoffs.

More experienced teachers have higher salaries that could save as many as two new teachers if their positions are not refilled, officials said.

The 131 retirements at Desert Sands Unified represented more than 2,500 total years of service.

“It’s impossible to calculate their value,” Desert Sands Teachers Association president Tom Burbank said.

“Even though you’re talking about two for one in salary exchange, you’re talking one for one in human beings.”

The decrease in staffing, which will lead to even more crowded classrooms, are part of school districts’ continuing attempts to slash millions from already tight budgets during this challenging economy.

“You can only cut back on our kids so much before you lose the concept of public education,” Palm Desert mom Tracy Meyer said Friday.

She has hired a tutor to help her son, an eighth-grader at Colonel Mitchell Paige Middle School in La Quinta, master algebra.

“(He has) a wonderful teacher, but she has too many kids,” Meyer said. “She just can’t get to them all.”

The class sizes may swell by as many as seven students in some cases.

That puts more pressure on the teachers not hit by layoffs and the students they are trying to serve.

“The standards haven’t gone away and the amount of material that they need to learn hasn’t gone away, but they get that much less of my time,” said Barry Wissman, a third-grade teacher at Julius Corsini Elementary in Desert Hot Springs.
Compounding effect

This is the third consecutive year of cuts for school districts, which are victims of the dwindling California state budget.

Last year, 249 teachers received final notices, but more than half were called back for this school year as budgets, enrollment and staffing needs were finalized.

Throughout the state, about 60 percent of the 26,000 teachers who received pink slips last year ended up losing their jobs.

Teachers are laid off based on seniority, so teachers such as DeNovi, who has two master’s degrees, and Mike Verhasselt, who started teaching as a second career, still land on the bottom of the list.

Verhasselt, a former bed-and- breakfast owner, was laid off from his position at Two Bunch Palms Elementary in Desert Hot Springs last year.

This year, he was called back in October to work at Landau Elementa ry in Cathedral City and plans to wait out the summer in hopes of getting called back again — in part because there are no teaching jobs available anywhere in the state.

“It’s kind of tiring,” he said. “If I get called back, it’s likely to repeat itself next year.”

Often, schools in more rural or low-income areas such as Two Bunch Palms, where Verhasselt originally worked, have a higher number of new teachers and thus get hit harder by the layoffs.

Desert Springs Middle School in Desert Hot Springs stands to lose 10 percent of its staff, Principal Ryan Saunders said.

“While this will be a tough transition, our team will continue to do ‘whatever it takes’ to meet the needs of our students,” he wrote in an e-mail.

The farther east and more rural a school is, the higher percentage of teachers tends to get noticed, Coachella Valley Teachers Association President Alexis Willis said.

Losing knowledge

At some schools, nearly every teacher in a grade level or subject area received notice, teachers reported.

“All this continuity gets lost,” Verhasselt said.

If all the layoffs and retirements go through, only four classroom teachers will return to Martin Van Buren Elementary in Indio, Principal Melinda Wallace said Friday.

Desert Sands and Coachella Valley unifieds are negotiating with employee groups over concessions such as furlough days or shorter school years.

About 60 percent of the Desert Sands Teachers Association members who responded to a union survey opposed concessions such as furlough days , Burbank said.

Teachers already are working with higher class sizes, paying more out of pocket for medical benefits and classroom supplies, and haven’t had a salary increase in four years, he said.

The district still hopes that all employees will come up with ways to share the burden, Assistant Superintendent of Personnel Sherry Johnstone said.

“If we all … do this together, then we can come up with some very workable solutions to lower class size and save jobs,” she said.

The timeline requirements of teacher layoffs force districts to send out layoff notices before receiving final budget numbers from Sacramento.

Depending on the governor’s revised budget that came out Friday, more layoff notices could be rescinded, McDaniel said.

“We’re certainly asking all employees of the school district to share in the sacrifice,” Coachella Valley Unified School District Superintendent Ricardo Medina said.