Quick Take
With a March 15 deadline looming, Live Oak School District teachers and parents say they hope the school district will reduce layoffs of teachers and staff members who work directly with students.
Live Oak School District remained in turmoil a day after a contentious four-hour meeting where board members failed to vote on layoffs to help stabilize the district’s finances.
Some parents of children in Live Oak schools told Lookout that they still don’t understand how the district could have suddenly found itself in such dire financial straits. “We didn’t even know about it,” said Brooke Bond, who has a child in Green Acres Elementary School and another ready to start kindergarten next year. “Why is it that we’re such involved parents and we ask questions constantly and yet we don’t know about resources or things being put into place?”
Others were surprised to learn Thursday morning that the assistant superintendent of human resources, who had helped draft the district’s stabilization plan and layoffs, had resigned. Heidi Winner Odom announced her resignation in an email to district staff. She has been an employee of the district for 30 years.
During Wednesday night’s presentations by Odom and assistant superintendent Hanwool Kim, who was hired in November to lead business services, parents and community members angrily expressed their distrust of the superintendents’ leadership. Community members blamed superintendents for the district’s budget crisis, told them they needed to come up with a better solution to avoid layoffs, accused them of being overpaid and demanded that the budget cuts should come from their office.
In her email to staff, Odom wrote that she had originally intended to quietly retire and had made plans to shift her responsibilities to other administrators to save money. But citing the district’s budget problems, as well as “disparaging remarks directed toward district office leadership,” she sent an all-staff email to show that administrators are among those who are personally trying to alleviate the budget crisis.
“Although I had envisioned retiring from LOSD, prioritizing my mental and physical well-being as well as the needs of my family, must now take precedence,” the email read. Odom told staff that she will concentrate in the coming months on helping the district transition without her.
Shoreline Middle School teacher Jeremy Powell said he did not see Odom’s resignation coming. “I was definitely surprised,” he said, adding he felt that if the board had approved the planned layoffs, she probably wouldn’t have resigned.
In an email to Lookout, Odom said she had made the decision to retire before Thursday and noted that her retirement is among the cost-saving measures included in the stabilization plan even though her position was not on the list of potential layoffs discussed at Wednesday’s meeting.
“For the record, I love, love, love Live Oak,” she wrote via email. “I love who I work with and who I work for, but right now, we are faced with some very tough decisions that need to be made for the sustainability of our beloved district, making it a challenging environment.”
Trustees were scheduled to vote Wednesday night to cut the equivalent of nearly 40 full-time positions – including teachers, instructional aides and a school psychologist – to meet a state-mandated March 15 deadline to issue layoff notices. But board members declined to second motions by board president Kristin Pfotenhauer to approve the layoffs, so the votes failed.
Pfotenhauer told the meeting that the board will likely have to hold another meeting next week to approve the planned layoffs and would vote on a final budget stabilization plan at a later date.
Both Pftotenhauer and Superintendent Daisy Morales told Lookout on Thursday that they were unavailable for comment.
At Wednesday’s meeting, teachers and community members repeatedly shouted at the board that they shouldn’t approve any of the cuts and that the district leadership was at fault for the current crisis. Teachers and parents emphasized that the district and board avoid layoffs of people closest to the students, like teachers, aides and mental health workers.
Many also criticized the board for approving salaries for the superintendent and assistant superintendents that they say are much higher than districts of their size. The California Department of Education reports that the average percentage of total district expenditures spent on medium-sized elementary school districts’ administrative salaries is 5.62%, compared to Live Oak School District’s figure of 8.6%.
Powell said he feels the board’s decision to not vote on the layoffs helped create a sense of relief for concerned community members. “I think people today took their collective breath,” he said, adding that he’s hopeful that the district will present a better plan for layoffs.
He said the teachers union plans to meet in the coming days with a school board member to talk about how to solve the budget crisis without cutting so many positions so close to the students.
Considering that the board essentially rejected the proposed layoffs as they were, the district team will have to propose a different plan it thinks will be more likely to get approved. However, considering the extent of the crisis and declining enrollment, Powell said he feels there “will definitely be some cuts.”
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