March 7, 2008
Layoffs Greet San Francisco School Teachers Today
535 San Francisco Unified School District teachers will receive layoff notices this morning due to state cuts in education funding. Today's pink slip handouts stem from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget '09, which will see San Francisco schools losing around $40 million. According to CBS 5, Mayor Newsom is doing what he can, even if it's a Band-Aid solution to a longterm problem.
Mayor Gavin Newsom has said he plans to ask the Board of Supervisors to allow the schools to tap into the city's rainy-day fund to help soften the financial blow, but officials admit that would only provide a "short-term solution."
CBS 5 goes on to say that "layoffs could ultimately total as many as a thousand." Yikes. The job terminations will go into effect once the school year ends.
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from what i understand, the progressives are fighting the gavster on this move. they'd rather pay for homeless memorials than educate our children.
seriously!
the press release (http://portal.sfusd.edu/data/news/pdf/3%206%2008%20SFUSD%20to%20Layoff%20535%20teachers_new.pdf) states, "At its February 26 meeting, the San Francisco Board of Education voted to reduce services by 535 full-time equivalent (FTE) employees: 140 full-time employees in administrative services and 395 full-time employees in instructional services." so technically, it's 395 teachers... but still! what will happen to our children? and with CA being 46th in spending per pupil, does this mean we'll now be at the bottom of the barrel?
Nice suckafree. Never miss an opportunity to bash the BoS. But remember back in January when the budget was announced, the School District had a press conference - several sups were there, as well as Leno and Migden, but Gavin couldn't find time in his busy schedule to help draw attention to the problem.
As for the homeless memorials, read the damn article. Those are privately funded.
And let's remember why we are in this mess in the first place: Governor Arnold. Our local pols can only do so much when the governator controls the state budget.
Suckafree, you think you're a card.
Maybe all those teachers who're being handed pink slips can get jobs as private tutors for the scary religious people who insist on "homelearnin'" their welps. See, the market always balances everything out. Isn't capitalism grrrrrreat?!
i just learned that we are spending 6k per student in public money for these kids to be home schooled. that is total bs. if you want to teach your kid at home, pay for the supplies yourself. i'm pissed!
ps i don't hate all the bofs', just the one's that have zero common sense (daly, peskin, mirkirimi)
angry,
our public education system is beyond broken. we have to scrap it and start over. declare bankruptcy if you will. like vallejo needs to do.
we can no longer force the public education system to teach all the immigrant kids how to speak english and expect them to continue teaching the rest of our kids everything they used to, with the of our kids while also teaching all of the worst p same resources and budget.
we have other issues just as problematic, the unions for example on both the teaching and the servicing side of education (custodians and lunch room workers for example) the whole idea of tenure needs to go out the window. nobody deserves a guaranteed right to stay employed, i'm sorry, fuck you if you don't understand that.
then we have the professional beurocrats drawing 200k salaries for doing things like approving 1 of the 46 title 9 types of funding and project plans.
you get the picture.
it's probably well beyond salvaging in it's current structure and format.
we need to start over.
Didn't our resident not-a-nazi governor promise that my child's education funds would never get cut if only we would elect him?
Hey people, we need that money for Iraq. If you're not for education budget cuts, you're with the terrorists.
Sigh. I wish we could NOT be a super power for a change. I wish we could just be a small non super country, with an excellent education and healthcare system and good public transit, like France, and Sweden, and oh hell, most of Europe.
Homeschooling? not so much.
I wish I could comment on this article, but it's so darn hard when them teachers never learned me to read.
Suckafree, what we need to do is adopt a more European style educational system - two tiers, one for those who are going on to university and one with the basics for those who aren't. Graduate the non-college bound kids at 16 and ship them off to trade schools, apprenticeships, or whatever. The resources currently being wasted on basically babysitting these people can then be used on prepping the college bound kids. The vast majority of Americans do not go to university. Good thing - our economy couldn't handle it. No reason to keep them imprisoned in over glorified day care centers under the assumption that they will be heading off to collitch.
We also need to refocus the community colleges into places focused on teaching people trades, not transferring them to universities. The whole notion that people are better off with college degrees is the biggest lie in the American mythos. It's also a lot of elitist garbage.
I have no idea what you're talking about with your whole anti-immigrant spiel. Like most immigrant bashing, sounds like hooey to me.
that is a great post angry. you are spot on. test them to see who gets a chance to go to subsidized college, kick them out after 4 years, just like in europe. the rest go to the academy of art/trade school du jour.
i was not immigrant bashing. think about what happens to a dysfunctional and beaucratic school system that is forced to teach millions of kids a year how to speak english every year. the only surprise here is that the structure of this archaic system is even remotely intact still.
the way things are going today, we are well on our way to having the first generation of manual laborers coming out of our schoools. maybe that will stop the influx of immigrants since americans will finally do those jobs.
;)