In June, San Diego Unified officials announced the district was projecting big deficits in the coming years. The expiration of hundreds of millions of federal Covid dollars, declining enrollment leading to a decline in funding and a ballooning state budget deficit were all pressing down on the district. Those factors combined to create a massive deficit that officials said could rise to $182 million by 2025-26 school year.
Still, some district officials said they were confident they’d be able to balance the books without resorting to the layoffs they’d turned to in previous years. At the time, board member Richard Barrera told me “If we need to reduce staff to maintain sort of the same ratios as enrollment and [average daily attendance] decline the district is very, very skilled at figuring out how to do that without laying people off.”
They’d accomplish this, Barrera said, by taking advantage of retirements (the district offered a $1,000 incentive to teachers willing to head to the door early) and not filling positions vacated by other departures. In budget presentations, district officials also said they’d chip away at the deficit by pursuing spending freezes, reductions in central office staff and programs and working to get average daily attendance (which determines funding) up from post-pandemic lows, during which time chronic absenteeism skyrocketed.
But even at the time, one board member struck a more gloomy tone. “This is a roadmap for sweating. We’re going to have to sweat a bit,” board Vice President Cody Petterson said at the June meeting.
Last week, Petterson got a little more explicit at a La Jolla cluster meeting. According to the La Jolla Light, he told attendees that teachers will begin to receive layoff notices in the coming months.
San Diego Unified officials did not respond to requests for comment, but in a Tuesday night phone call, Petterson said while there certainly would be layoffs, the scale is still yet to be determined. The board will be voting on the actual number during its March 5 meeting.
But, Petterson said, district officials are doing their best to limit the overall number of layoff notices sent out, which he said can be traumatic for employees to receive. Petterson emphasized the district’s goal is to urge teachers already planning on retiring to give officials a heads-up and encourage those who may be open to retiring early to do so in the hopes that the number of actual layoffs can be minimized. The district is even offering $1,000 to educators willing to retire early.
“In general, we are attempting to manage it by doing as much as we can through attrition and early retirement,” Petterson said.
Because seniority plays a role in who gets laid off, teachers who’ve reached retirement age would be unlikely candidates. Those departures would likely save the jobs of younger, less experienced teachers.
While the scale of the layoffs is yet to be determined, Petterson said officials have decided they want to focus the reductions on people not directly interacting with students, like central office staff. Part of this, he said, is to ensure they’re cutting “fat and not muscle.”
“If you are a teacher and you are in front of students, those are the people least likely to receive a pink slip because we absolutely need those teachers. We’d like to reduce layoffs to a minimum for frontline educators,” Petterson said.
As an SDUSD employee the district will lay off teachers. What they did last time was go back over 20 yrs for subjects that the district felt was not that important; PE, Science, Art, etc. $1000 incentive to retire? What a joke. All they will get is those that were going to retire anyhow. If they want to rid the top earners they need to offer 2 yrs of service credit. Instead they will layoff staff, disrupt students and blame covid money drying up. SDUSD board does not have mirror so they never look at the root cause, their lack of budgeting 101
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Offering two-year payments as early retirement incentives (SERPs) is not a fiscally responsible solution. It actually costs the district millions of dollars more. The district is facing budget shortfalls for the foreseeable future, meaning any additional costs (such as a SERP) will result in even deeper cuts in future budget years.
Wow, a thousand dollar incentive to retire! Hahaha! Sign me up! Several years ago a friend of mine who was in the HR dept. got $200,000 to retire early. I’ll take that, but not $1,000.