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Employees of the Santa Paula Elementary School District rally outside the Elementary School Board meeting Tuesday evening. The employees rally took place in protest of the School Board's decision to lay off instructional assistants and other classified staff as a cost saving measure. In a prepared press release Sue Carpenter, president of California School Employees Association Santa Paula Chapter 497 said, “this round of layoffs is unnecessary.” |
S.P. Elementary School employees protest layoffs
April 20, 2012
Santa Paula News
Scores of Santa Paula Elementary School District employees rallied with signs reading “No more cuts” to protest proposed layoffs of mostly classified employees before Tuesday’s school board meeting, which was moved to the Glen City School cafeteria to accommodate the crowd.
Despite the protests and multiple speakers urging the school district to retain employees, the board unanimously approved all the layoffs.
Nearly 100 residents and classified employees packed the meeting, urging the school board to dip into its $5 million reserves rather than lay off 24 employees --18 part-time positions, a full-time operations director, and two supervisors and three teachers in the preschool program. The state requires school districts to have a 3 percent reserve, which is just under $1 million for SPESD, said Assistant Superintendent of Business Services Cathy Bojorquez.
“It’s not raining, it’s flooding,” said Robert O’Reilly of Camarillo, a labor relations representative standing in for SPESD Labor Relations representative Tron Burdick on behalf of the classified employees’ union, California School Employees Association Santa Paula Chapter 497. “You have all the lifeboats and you’re not letting us in on them. You’re creating a Titanic here.”
To a standing ovation, he criticized the school board at length. “You guys are not using the funds the way they’re designed to be used,” he said. Laying off so many people results in them not being able to pay their bills and losing their homes, he said. “You hurt your community. Get off that reserve you are sitting on and invest in the future.”
Superintendent Dr. F. Paul Chounet said the school district has “reserves over the limit,” but because of its two-year budget cycle, it has “to plan for the third year out in times of declining enrollment. We won’t be making our statutory reserves in year three in our current situation.”
Whether or not the district has to implement midyear cuts of $1.3 million in the coming school year will depend on the fate of the state initiatives for education on the November ballot, said Trustee Rick Cadman. He added that the CSEA sponsored his school board election campaign and the pain of making cuts is one reason he is not seeking re-election.
School board member Anthony Perez, who has been on the board 14 years, took issue with O’Reilly’s comments. “I don’t take cutting people’s livelihoods lightly,” he said. “I have been here since 1957. It hurts me because I’m part of this community. For a person to say the board doesn’t have a heart is insulting. I do have a heart. Times are tough and I have sympathy for anybody faced with losing their job. I don’t like it, believe me.”
“This round of layoffs is unnecessary,” said Sue Carpenter, president of CSEA’s Santa Paula chapter. Reserves are five times what the state requires, she said. Given that 30 percent of the district’s classified staff has already been laid off in recent years, the employees left are “doing others’ work to the point of breaking.”
Cathy Fernandez of Santa Paula, wife of Santa Paula City Councilman Ralph Fernandez and mother of three daughters in elementary school and one in high school, urged the board to dip into its reserves, especially for special education aides. “I hate to see special education get cuts in aide hours that are critical to their success,” she said.
Maria Perez, a mother of five children, one of whom is starting kindergarten in the fall, said the custodians and teachers’ aides are vital to the education and well-being of Santa Paula’s students. “I want to say thank you to the classified staff,” she said.
