PVUSD pink slips 201 employees

It's happening all over the state. School districts are taking a dramatic financial hit all over Calfornia next year thanks to Arnold's slashing of public school funding. Pajaro Valley school district is looking at having to cut 9.4 million dollars from their general fund next year and those being most adversely affected are elementary school students, their teachers, and the nurses who keep them healthy.

Different districts are responding in different ways to the cuts, making adjustments as necessary. PVUSD has opted to remove the people who have the most immediate positive impact on the students in the district from the classroom instead of chopping off some high-paying administration level positions.

In a desperate move to balance a budget and save their own jobs, the administrators of PVUSD have decided not to trim the fat from the top of the pyramid, rather preserving their high salary positions while instead removing a possible 130 teachers from the classroom. What does this look like for students? Larger class size, for one. The current ratio of 20:1 in Kindergarten through 3rd grade could be bumped up to 34:1.

What could the district have done differently? Well I have a few suggestions for them that would take a bit longer than the 90 seconds they allow for in comment sessions at board meetings, so here goes:

First and foremost, the district MUST place a freeze on hiring the new $180,000 a year district superintendent that has yet to be found. I'm in a classroom everyday and trust me, I've done just fine without this person.

My second suggestion is that next year, instead of spending $100,000 to hire some energy guru to come in and turn down classroom thermastats (see Peter Nichol's op-ed in the Pajaronian for more on that), you can hire one of those laid-off teachers to do the same job for less than half! (need i remind you that PVUSD teacher's salary is in the bottom 10% of the state?)

Here's another idea: let's put aside the adoption of the new Harcourt/Houghton Mifflin math adoption that is going to be just like the one we already use. That should save a few hundred thousand right there.

But now for the big one. Let's talk about those new district administration contracts that you approved 6-1 the DAY AFTER the spending freeze was implemented as a results of Arnie's cuts. Even though those three assistant superintendent contracts weren't due up for renewal until June (just like the teachers' contracts will be), you slid through in a closed-door session approval of these inflated salaries. I don't even know what those assistant supes do, but I can't imagine it's more valuable than what a classroom teacher (and a bilingual one at that) does on a daily basis to improve the lives of her students. It is time for you to take back those contracts and make cuts AS FAR FROM THE CLASSROOM AS POSSIBLE.

I'm sure there are other teachers out there that might like to chime in about what the district could do instead of sending out the pink-slips.