Here’s a snippet that got cut from my article about the weird way that San Diego Unified allocates money for schools. It comes from a parent and school district employee who compared the bumping process that displaces workers to a chess game. Such bumping is intended to be diminished under a new, more standardized way of budgeting for schools:
“Every single year you have people who are changing,” said Cindy McIntyre, president of the San Diego Unified Council of Parent Teacher Associations. McIntyre said some schools replaced all of their office staff last year. “Nobody knew where anything was or what had gone on in the past. It became chaotic until people got a handle on things.”
Other factoids from the cutting room floor:
- Pacific Beach Middle School Principal Julie Martel estimates that she oversaw 20 different attendance clerks in seven years at a previous middle school, also due to the persistent bumping of employees from school to school.
- A recent report by the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, an outside group that consults school districts, estimated that roughly 3,900 employees were bumped after more than 700 employees were laid off last spring.
I also heard from a former employee who was not a fan of the plan to change the funding formula because the power to choose which jobs to cut and which to keep is being shifted to the central offices — instead of the school principal. And he was not convinced that bumping would decrease.
What do you think? E-mail me at emily.alpert@voiceofsandiego.org or send in a letter to the editor.