Furious parents, teachers confront Live Oak School District as board fails to vote on layoffs

Angry parents, teachers and students lashed out at Live Oak School District officials Wednesday over plans to issue widespread layoffs, blaming board members for not communicating the depths of the district’s budget crisis until it was too late to avoid deep cuts.

“If you’re cutting positions in the schools that directly impact students, more people are going to leave the district,” said Alexandria Leckliter, one of almost 100 people who attended a district board meeting that lasted four hours Wednesday night at Green Acres Elementary School. 

Leckliter said parents feel as though they have no transparency on how the district makes decisions on staffing and salaries: “How can we have parents on board with what is happening and how the dollars are being spent?”

The Santa Cruz County Office of Education warned the district in January that it didn’t have enough cash to meet its financial obligations for the coming school years. In response, the district leaders drafted a plan to stabilize the budget that calls for laying off some teachers and classroom aides, reducing the hours of others and opting not to fill vacant positions. In total, the district said it needed to cut the equivalent of 37.8 full-time employees, saving nearly $3 million next school year and $6 million by 2025-26. The district has 280 employees and serves nearly 1,700 students.

Among the cuts, the district is proposing to lay off seven full-time teachers from across its three elementary schools, eliminate one of its three school psychologist positions and reduce the hours for special education instructional aides, along with cuts to custodial, maintenance and administrative staff.

Superintendent Daisy Morales told parents and teachers that she’s “heartbroken” about what’s happening. Because of a range of factors, the district doesn’t have the funding to keep these positions. “No one signs up to do these kinds of cuts to staff,” she said. 

She added that she apologizes if the district’s budget status wasn’t communicated in a way that families can understand: “I own that.” 

Live Oak School District is facing a tight deadline to approve its budget-stabilization plan because of a state law requiring that layoff notices be issued by March 15. The board was set to vote Wednesday night on the potential long list of layoffs, but after a fierce backlash from community members, none of the three resolutions authorizing the layoffs even made it to a vote. Kristin Pfotenhauer, president of the five-member governing board, motioned to vote on the items, but no other board member offered to second the motions. 

Board member Jeremy Ray told the meeting that the board will have to bring the proposed layoffs back for a vote in the near future – likely next week, Pfotenhauer said. Ray emphasized to the crowd that if the district can’t approve its stabilization plan, it risks becoming insolvent, which could force the state to take it over. Demonstrating the frustration of many in the crowd with district leadership, several people said they did want the state to take over the district.

Board members did vote unanimously to accept a proposal by Morales to rescind a raise the board had approved for her only weeks earlier, at its Feb. 7 meeting. Board member Paul Garcia was absent for the vote.

Throughout the four hours of the meeting, parents and teachers and district staff spoke out to denounce comments by board members and district staff. 

Parent Stacey Kyle said she has one student at Shoreline Middle School and another who graduated last year. She said that the district has talked a lot about family and community engagement in the past several years. 

“There was no effort to communicate the status of the district’s budget problems to the parents or the larger community,” she said. “Nor transparency about the decision-making process used to identify where the cuts should come from, let alone engagement in the shared decision-making process. The only information that was shared by the district was legally required, buried in technical high-level literacy documents in the language different from the one spoken by more than 40% of our parents.” 

While Kyle said that none of the positions should be cut, she was one of many to also specifically mention the proposed reduction of Shoreline Middle School Assistant Principal Melissa Nix. Kyle said Nix, who was honored by the County Office of Education in 2023 as an administrator of the year, and Shoreline Principal Colleen Martin have helped maintain students’ academic and mental well-being. 

Sheila McNeese, who has two children at Green Acres Elementary School, said that Nix and Martin “are this district’s dream team.”  

Morales told the meeting that one reason the district faces such steep cuts is that it invested a lot of one-time state and federal funds into hiring. It added yard-duty hours, custodians, mental health clinicians and other roles, but the funding for those positions wasn’t permanent. 

She said the district could have done layoffs last year, but it wanted to keep the one-time funded services as long as it had the money for them. Morales added that she agreed with members of the public who said the funding and budget system is broken, and she encouraged people to advocate at the state level to improve how education is funded. 

She also encouraged anyone who wanted to see the work that she and the district’s assistant superintendents do to follow her for a day.  

“Come shadow me for a day and see what I do,” she said, adding that they work 70- to 80-hour work weeks.

As the longest-serving board member, Ray said he feels particularly responsible for the district’s current financial situation. He was elected in 2012, when he said the district was still struggling from the 2008 financial crisis. 

Decisions that he and the board made since then to increase salaries and dig into the reserve fund left the district in the state it’s in now, he said.

Ray told the parents and teachers that he understands their disappointment and anger. A local fire captain who’s been a first responder for 27 years, he said he missed the previous two board meetings because of work and apologized for that. 

He’s been catching up on the many letters and emails from community members. “A lot of those emails have said that there’s a lack of leadership in the district, that’s how we got here,” he said. “That we could have anticipated this and seen what’s coming. And I just, I just want to say that that’s all true.” 

The crowd, with some standing, applauded his comments. “That lack of leadership falls on me,” Ray added. 

Board members said they will have to schedule special board meetings as early as next week to vote on the proposed layoffs in order to meet the state-mandated deadline. 

Pfotenhauer also announced that the district will be holding a parent and community forum about the budget crisis on Feb. 29 at one of the larger schools. The board will release more details once it has finalized a location and time. 

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