Quick Take
Pajaro Valley Unified School District’s governing board has challenging decisions to make at its Wednesday evening board meeting. Trustees will vote on making about 100 full-time-equivalent layoffs to staff as a result of the district’s loss of one-time pandemic funds from the federal government and from declining enrollment.
Following Pajaro Valley Unified School District’s approval last month of $5 million in budget cuts, the governing board is scheduled to vote Wednesday on the layoffs corresponding both to those cuts and also as a result of aligning staff-to-student ratios due to the district’s declining enrollment.
The teachers union, the Pajaro Valley Federation of Teachers, is organizing a protest against the layoffs and says students, parents and teachers will rally at 4:30 p.m. at the Watsonville City Council chambers, located at 275 Main St. in Watsonville. The board meeting starts at 6 p.m. and will be held at the city council chambers.
PVUSD officials say they need to make the $5 million in cuts because those dollars are from one-time federal funding sources provided during the pandemic and are now gone, and that the district also has to lay off positions to account for the projected loss of 600 students into the new school year.
Santa Cruz County’s student enrollment declined about 16% to 18% over the past decade and is projected to continue declining about 18% into the next decade, according to the state’s Department of Finance.
At the Wednesday board meeting, trustees will vote on layoffs that include four high school science teachers, 10.25 instructional assistants, three mental health clinicians and three elementary general education teachers, among many more. District officials emphasize that the entire list, which totals 100.55 full-time-equivalent positions, includes 14 known teacher retirements and many teacher positions for people who aren’t fully credentialed teachers and have just one-year contracts.
“This is hard,” said Superintendent Heather Contreras during a media briefing Tuesday morning. “No district wants to engage in reductions, but we are also trying to mitigate those reductions by engaging in activities and things that we can do, such as offering a $10,000 retirement benefit to our teachers to try to help mitigate and soften the reductions that we need to make.”
District officials say that, for comparison, during last year’s reductions and retirements, 60 certificated staff positions were closed.
Pajaro Valley Federation of Teachers President Nelly Vaquera-Boggs said it felt like a “gut punch” when she first saw the total number of proposed layoffs.
“Our proposal is not to lay people off, and our proposals are always [to] look at natural attrition,” she said. “So if somebody’s going to retire, maybe you don’t fill that position.”
PVUSD isn’t alone in making painful cuts as a result of the loss of covid funding and declining enrollment, among other factors. Last week, Live Oak School District approved its plans to balance its budget amid a $2 million budget shortfall. About $1.2 million of LOSD’s plan includes reductions to the district’s personnel, including classroom aides and intervention teachers.
Both PVUSD and LOSD, like all public school districts in California, are required by the state’s Education Code to notify employees of layoffs by March 15. The districts have until May 15 to make final decisions on the cuts.
On Wednesday, in order to meet the March and May deadlines, the Pajaro Valley board will vote on two separate layoff resolutions: one for the number of classified positions and one for the number of certificated positions. The proposal includes cutting 19.75 full-time-equivalent classified positions and 80.8 full-time-equivalent positions for certificated positions.
If the board approves the resolutions, the next step is for human resources staff to look at which people will be laid off using the staff seniority lists. For example, people with temporary contracts are the least senior and thus first to be considered for layoffs.
District officials say the cuts won’t eliminate or cut any programs or services the district currently provides and the layoffs to teachers won’t change class size.
The proposed cuts
On the resolution for cuts to full-time-equivalent classified positions, the proposal is to cut one full-time-equivalent child welfare and attendance analyst, one full-time-equivalent communications specialist, a 0.5 payroll technician, three mental health clinicians and several others.
The district currently has a total of 15 mental health clinicians: four dedicated to special education students, one for early childhood and the rest for the general population. Three of them are paired with a school resource officer at Watsonville High School, Pajaro Valley High School and Aptos High School as part of the school’s resource officer program.
The district’s staff is proposing cutting three full-time-equivalent mental health clinicians but is maintaining the positions dedicated to the school resource officer program, early childhood education and special education programs.
On the resolution for cuts to certificated staff, there’s a much longer list of teachers at the elementary, middle and high school levels as well as cuts to 5.5 full-time-equivalent coordinator positions and two full-time-equivalent director positions.
The certificated list includes the 14 known teacher retirements, 39 teachers who aren’t credentialed and are on temporary one-year contracts, seven teachers on temporary status and 11 intern teachers.
Additionally, the recommendation for certificated layoffs includes cutting six full-time equivalent counselor positions of the district’s total 47 full-time equivalent counselor positions. The counselor positions are made up of social emotional counselors and academic counselors.
Currently, the district has 18 full-time-equivalent social emotional counselors and 29 academic counselors. Some of the total 47 split half of their time serving as academic counselors and half of their time as social emotional counselors.
If the governing board doesn’t pass the resolutions on Wednesday, that puts the district at risk of not being fiscally solvent. If that happens, Contreras said Tuesday morning, the board is essentially telling the state Department of Education it needs help and the state takes over the governing board and all of its decision-making.
“If a state takeover were to happen, what that means is that we would not be able to be financially responsible to make decisions as a district,” she said. “The state comes and makes those decisions for you, so you lose your ability as a community to make the decisions for your own students, as you would see fit.”
The meeting will take place at 6 p.m. at the Watsonville City Council chambers and will also be livestreamed here: https://www.youtube.com/c/pvusdstreaming/live.
For more from Contreras about the cuts, click here to read a message she sent out on Sunday and click here to read an FAQ about the cuts and the budget.
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