PVUSD family, special education staff say proposed cuts will ‘devastate’ most vulnerable students

Cora Realmuto, a special education student in Pajaro Valley Unified School District, was struggling. 

Her first grade teacher at Bradley Elementary School in Corralitos was new to managing a classroom with 11 kids with developmental disabilities. Previously, she’d worked only one-on-one with students. She wore a mask, which made it difficult for Cora to practice her speech. When Cora would grab other students excitedly during a general education class, an aide who accompanied her from the special education classroom would steer her outside for a walk as a way to keep the disruption to a minimum rather than working to improve the behavior.

Cora started having trouble sleeping. She had potty accidents. By the second week of classes, she screamed on the way to school, “No school! No want go!” 

Cora needed a different educational setting. Her parents, Nick and Mads Realmuto, researched other schools within the district. Within days, Cora was enrolled in an autism class at Rio Del Mar Elementary. 

On her first day, Cora found her desk decorated with unicorns – a favorite of hers; her new teacher’s doing. Cora quickly settled into her new class, with a teacher and five behavior technicians, who take diligent notes of student behavioral patterns. 

After her first day at Rio Del Mar, Cora’s potty accidents stopped, and within her first week there, her sleep began recovering and she loved school again, Mads said. Two weeks later, on a Sunday, she had a meltdown.

“She wanted to go to school,” said Mads, who had to explain there was no school on Sundays. “She absolutely wanted to go to school.” 

Cora’s condition, microdeletion syndrome, is caused by a missing piece of chromosome; it leads to developmental delays including motor and verbal skills. Since age 2, Cora has received speech therapy, occupational therapy, behavioral therapy and physical therapy, to help her with everything from pronouncing words to putting on her clothes and walking. 

Cora could soon face another challenge. Pajaro Valley Unified is proposing significant staffing cuts to the special education program as part of its strategy to solve a $15.3 million budget deficit. The district board of trustees is scheduled to vote on the reductions during its Thursday meeting.

Mads Realmuto said he was stunned when he saw the school district’s proposal, which included laying off more than 40 full-time-equivalent positions from the special education program. 

“It’s so scary to me,” he said. “Because already the district is not delivering enough services.” 

Faced with years of declining enrollment and the loss of one-time COVID funds that were used for permanent positions, PVUSD officials are proposing overall cuts of 160 full-time-equivalent positions, including the special education positions. Last school year, the district eliminated 54 positions as part of its first of three years of projected reductions. 

District officials say the cuts are focused on positions that were added with COVID funding from the state and federal governments, as well as in areas where enrollment has declined.The district lost 450 students this academic year and projects it will lose another 500 next year. The cuts, district officials say, are intended to match the number of students to the appropriate number of staff. 

Parents, teachers and special education workers tell Lookout they already feel stretched thin; they’re shocked at the extent of the cuts and fear the reductions will harm some of the most vulnerable students in the district. 

“These layoffs will absolutely devastate our special ed population,” said Brandon Diniz, a special education teacher and teachers union president. 

The district, he added, is currently either not meeting the needs of students in special education, or it’s meeting the bare minimum. Diniz knows the Realmuto family and the struggles Cora has had. He said her experience is not unique.

“This is happening in all of our schools all across our district – where our students are under-supported, and the district does not care,” he said. “The only type of support they will offer is when parents have to fight and beg for it.”

Diniz said by cutting instructional aides, there won’t be enough aides for each student in special education to have their time in general education classrooms. 

He added that the district’s proposed staffing ratio of 12 students to one teacher and one or two aides is “the most unrealistic recommendation I have ever seen.” When he taught in a class of 12 students with mild to moderate disabilities, he had four instructional assistants but each one of them was swamped and sometimes were asked to cover for other classes. 

Ashley Yoro Flowers, president of the union that represents the behavior technicians and instructional aides, agreed with Diniz: “We are extremely understaffed.” 

Lookout repeatedly sought interviews with the school district to understand how it plans to address these concerns. None was provided.

Many concerned parents have reached out to a local nonprofit focused on providing support and resources to families of children with disabilities: Special Parents Information Network (SPIN). Its director, Becka York, told Lookout that the network has received an “overwhelming number of calls from parents” who are worried about the proposal.

York is a former special education teacher and a parent of a child with an individualized education program in Scotts Valley. For more than 20 years, SPIN has run support groups and workshops, and provided individual consultation and resource navigation.

York said she’s trying to reassure families that public schools are required by federal law to provide free and appropriate public education for students in special education programs.

“Parents should feel empowered to ask questions … and share concerns,” she said, adding that parents can participate further by attending school board meetings or writing to school board members their concerns. 

Cora’s advocate is her dad Mads. He said their family is fortunate to have the financial means for him to have quit his job last year to make sure his daughter’s needs are met. At one point, he spent 20 hours a week on the phone with his insurance company, urging it to cover Cora’s behavior therapy services. He visits her classroom, talks to teachers and staff and has meetings with district officials about her care. He knows that many families in the district can’t do that. 

After he saw the proposed cuts, he began connecting with other concerned parents, and they’ve formed a group of about 60 families of children in special education. The “Parents of PVUSD” group started emailing school board members in the weeks following the Nov. 12 board meeting, when cuts were first made public. Mads met with some of the board members, and he requested a meeting with Superintendent Heather Contreras. 

“I think the reality is the district has to make cuts,” he said. “But when it comes to proposing cuts to instructional aides, behavior technicians, behaviorists, the reality is they are already struggling to deliver on legally required services.” 

Last year, Cora struggled when her Bradley Elementary class went through three temporary substitutes because the school wasn’t able to find a permanent, credentialed teacher who had experience teaching a full classroom. 

Now the district is “saying, ‘Let’s cut these things when we’re already not delivering in the way that we should,’” Mads Realmuto said. “To me, that’s frightening.”

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FOR THE RECORD: This story has been updated and clarified to add more information about Cora Realmuto’s Bradley Elementary experience.

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