CPS Layoffs Set a ‘Dangerous Precedent’ (IL)
July 6, 2010
With her long list of special-education credentials, Deborah Domes has traveled all over the city teaching some of Chicago’s most heart-wrenching cases –from terminally ill teenagers to "Girl X" of Cabrini-Green, after the youngster emerged from a coma.
With her prized national certification in teaching, Erin O’Brien enjoyed helping new teachers in seven schools, offering the kind of support she never received during her first year as a Chicago Public School teacher.
Both women were among 226 CPS teachers left without jobs last week, caught in the switches of an Illinois cash crunch that has spread like a cancer, contributing to teacher layoff decisions at CPS and other districts statewide.
In Chicago, the very expertise that boosted Domes and O’Brien out of regular daily classrooms put them in budget-cutting crosshairs. They were among 226 "citywide" teachers who are not formally attached to a classroom who were laid off June 30, without regard to seniority or tenure, in a new CPS interpretation of the teachers contract. All lost the 10-month pay cushion usually offered displaced and often less-credentialed CPS teachers.
For O’Brien, a 40-year-old mother of two and wife of an artist, the timing couldn’t have been worse. "I’m nine months pregnant. My husband is a stay-at-home dad. I am the only source of income to my family and I’m having a high-risk c-section July 22."
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Last week, O’Brien worried that she would have to come up with $1,220 in monthly COBRA health insurance payments to ensure her delivery will be covered. Her new insurance costs alone will eat up almost everything she will get if she files for unemployment benefits, O’Brien said.
Nevertheless, "I have to pay for COBRA. I have no choice because the delivery will be very expensive," said O’Brien, a 16-year CPS veteran who had been a mentor teacher with the Chicago New Teachers Center.
CPS officials said Sunday that laid-off "citywide" employees like O’Brien will be covered by insurance until July 31 and can vie for jobs at an upcoming job fair.
Even so, O’Brien still has to make future COBRA payments, deliver a child, juggle a newborn, pay her bills, look for a job and prepare two kids for fall classes at Ravenswood School, where she once mentored. Plus, she must put her Ph.D classes on hold.
"I have to be able to feed my kids and pay my mortgage and not be homeless,” O’Brien said. "Without my income, that’s it. That’s what we live on."
O’Brien was given two weeks’ layoff notice, but Domes, age 59, got only three business days to decide whether to be laid off June 30 or retire early and cash in about 200 sick days — more than one year’s salary. She took retirement.
Domes figures she will lose $800 to $1,000 a month in pension payments for the rest of her life, but she couldn’t take the chance she would find a CPS job in the 10 months needed to hold on to her sick days.
"I had to take the bird in the hand," said Domes, who is credentialed to teach the learning disabl ed, behaviorally disturbed, physically handicapped and grades seven through 12.
"They have already taken enough away from me. I couldn’t risk them taking any more.
"My trust in CPS is gone, literally gone. If I asked someone down there what time it is, I probably would look at the clock to double check. That’s how much I don’t trust them," Domes said.
Now, her 67-year-old husband will probably have to delay his retirement and Domes, who supports her mother in an assisted-living facility, must watch her pennies.
Since 1975, Domes has worked for an elite unit, called the home hospital instruction program, that brought lessons to ill or disabled children in homes, hospitals, psychiatric wards and rehabilitation centers. The unit’s 13 laid-off teachers needed multiple special-education certificates to teach such students, Domes said.
Early on, Domes said, she visited kids in their homes, including one girl whose prostitute-mother serviced a client behind the curtained door of her bedroom as Domes worked with her daughter at the kitchen table.
"The mother said, ‘That is what I do for a living,’ " Domes recalled. "I said, ‘You know, I don’t care what anyone does for a living but I’m trying to teach your daughter here.’ She said she would try to change her hours."
Domes taught "Girl X," the 9-year-old who had been left beaten, poisoned and sexually assaulted in a Cabrini-Green stairwell in 1997. "She was totally reclusive," Domes said. "First you had to get her to accept you."
More recently, Domes traveled to every CPS hi gh school annually to monitor their homebound programs.
After teaching the most heartbreaking cases in CPS, home hospital instruction teachers say they can’t believe how heartlessly they have been treated.
"The rawness of this is unbelievable," said one, Jeanne Edmondson, 60, who supports a 10-year-old girl she adopted from China and also was pushed into early retirement. She has since been forced to try to sell her house, she said.
"We have to hold the most certificates of anyone in the system and we were told that we had three business days to make a life-altering decision," Edmondson said.
Another "citywide" layoff, a 42-year-old single woman, is now struggling to pay her rent, two student loans and her car payment. To keep her air conditioning bills down, her thermostat is set at 80 degrees and she is deciding what bills to eliminate.
Already, the pressure is taking an emotional toll.
"I cry at the drop of a dime," said the former literacy coach, who asked for anonymity. "I can’t sleep at night. . . . My brain won’t turn off. I feel sorry for myself. What am I going to do?
"At 42, I thought I’d be established enough in my life to have a job. I really have to reconsider what I’m doing for a living," she said.
O’Brien and others predicted the system’s decision to dump expert tenured teachers who advanced beyond a daily classroom could come back to haunt CPS. In the future, O’Brien said, teachers may avoid leadership roles if they think they could lose their tenure rights by taking them.
&#x 0A;Said O’Brien: "This sets a very dangerous precedent."