I just updated our interactive map of teacher layoffs to include new numbers after San Diego Unified ramped up the number of educators who were warned that their jobs are on the line. More than 1,300 educators, including teachers, nurses and counselors, were warned that they could be laid off to close an estimated $120 million deficit. Click on the map to find details for specific schools:
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| Click on the map to interact with it. |
Red schools received layoff warnings for 30 percent or more of their teachers, counselors and other educators. Orange schools fall between 20 and 30 percent, yellow ones between 10 and 20 percent, and green ones below 10 percent. Blue schools have no educators slated to be laid off.
These numbers are based on a new memo sent to the school board today by Deputy Superintendent Phil Stover. The pink slips are just warnings, not actual layoffs, but they represent how many educators could potentially be laid off. School districts usually warn far more teachers than they actually lay off.
The newest teachers are typically the first to be laid off. Schools with newer staff, often those in poorer neighborhoods that struggle to keep teachers, are hit harder with pink slips than other schools. If you look at where the red schools are you can see that pattern here.
This doesn’t mean that any school would have half as many teachers next year. All schools will still be staffed. More seasoned teachers who are displaced from other schools would fill the gaps.
And because class sizes are surging, all schools would shrink their staffs and lose teachers. But the hardest hit schools would have to replace more of their teachers because more of them get laid off.
I wrestled a lot with whether to keep the color codes the same as on our first map, since more layoffs mean there are now schools with far more than 30 percent of their educators at stake. I ultimately decided it was better to be consistent, to show how many more warnings have gone out to educators. But this makes it harder to see how much worse the numbers are at some schools, since schools losing 60 percent and 30 percent look the same.
To provide a clearer comparison, I focused chiefly on neighborhood elementary, middle and high school and magnet schools; I left out alternative schools and those that focus only on students with special needs.
Got a burning question? Check this explainer to see if we’ve answered it already. And please let me know any schools are missing or the data is faulty!
Please contact Emily Alpert directly at emily.alpert@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.550.5665 and follow her on Twitter: twitter.com/emilyschoolsyou.