This just in from the Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD) employees:
A CALL TO ACTION
SANTA ANA UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT EMPLOYEES NEED YOUR HELP!
Don’t Let the Santa Ana Unified School District Board Members Eliminate Needed Services to Your Children at your K – 12 School Sites.
What: The Santa Ana Unified School District Board members are proposing reducing work hours of needed classified employees at the school sites. The targeted jobs are: classroom assistants, secretarial staff, health clerks, custodians, securities, library clerks, attendance and computer techs among others. Hundreds of positions will be converted from full-time to part-time. The proposal does not apply to the District Administration offices.
When: Tuesday, July 8th
Where: SAUSD District Board Room,
1601 E. Chestnut Street, Santa Ana, CA 92701
Time: 4 p.m. is the rally and 6 p.m. is the Board Meeting.
Who is Affected: Your Children!
Please email the School Board Members and tell them that you are opposed to cutting services to your students:
Rosemarie Avila at OCYCRosie@yahoo.com
Jose Alfredo Hernandez at hernandez.ja@sbcglobal.net
John Palacio at jpalacio@pacbell.net
Rob Richardson at rob.richardson@ocgov.com
Audrey Yamagata-Noji at Ayamagata-noji@mtsac.edu
URGE THEM TO VOTE NO ON CLASSIFIED CUTS!
The following is an article forwarded to John Palacios’ email group. If you are not currently on his email list (all email addresses are kept private) and you would like to subscribe to it, please contact him directly: jpalacio@pacbell.net
If you live in Santa Ana and you care about the schools and school district, if you are an employee of SAUSD, or if your children attend the SAUSD schools, then you should consider being kept in the informational loop. SAUSD has agenda and transparency issues that affect us all. It’s time to wake up and get organized to thwart these dishonest cuts.
From the email:
Special ed cuts total $7.6 million for Santa Ana
District says reductions are needed to balance budget, but parents and teachers worry about their impact.
By FERMIN LEAL THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
SANTA ANA In the past six months, Santa Ana Unified School District has cut about $7.6 million from special education programs and services.
District officials say the loss of instructional aides, psychologists and other services is needed to balance the budget, but many parents, teachers and others say the deep cuts will hurt the neediest students the most.
The district, with an enrollment of 54,000, has 4,689 special education students. Last school year, it spent $80.8 million on special education, or 16 percent of the budget, according to state and district data.
Trustees approved about $1.3 million in cuts to special education last month. Since December, trustees voted to cut a com- bined $7.6 million from special education primarily by eliminating 177 instructional aide positions.
In addition, the district will stop outsourcing many special education services to save money, including a deaf and hard-of-hearing program that had been operated by Newport-Mesa Unified. Three psychologist positions will also be cut.
Santa Ana Unified trustee John Palacio said cuts in his district are the most severe in the county.
“This district is balancing the budget on the backs of our special education students,” said Palacio, who has repeatedly voted against budget cuts that include cuts to special education.
The instructional aides losing their jobs work with mild to moderately disabled students enrolled in regular classes. The aides provide more personalized support to special education students and help them better understand lesson plans and other concepts, while regular teachers focus on the other students.
District officials will create 208 new instructional aide positions to work with these same students, but the employees will work fewer hours per day, at lower salaries and with no medical benefits. The new aide jobs, which will likely include many of those who lost their jobs and reapplied, will work 3.75 hours daily instead of six hours.
The reduction of hours and loss of benefits will place the district on par with what most other districts across the county offer for similar services, said Doreen Lohnes, the district’s director of special education.
The 205 instructional aides who work with severely disabled students would not be affected by the budget cuts, officials said.
Parent Tomasa Sanchez, whose autistic son attends Valley High, said the cuts to special educations could lead to more lawsuits that will end up costing the district more in the long term.
“If our son’s education suffers, we won’t have many other options,” she said. “We just want what’s best for him.”
But Superintendent Jane Russo has said that all special education students will still receive all the services and resources they are entitled to, regardless of district’s budgetary issues.
Special education at a glance
How many: About 1 0 percent of California’s public school students qualify for some type of services.
The law: Federal and state laws require that all students with disabilities receive a free and appropriate public education in the least-restrictive environment.
Funding decline: In recent years, state and federal funding has decreased for special education, meaning local districts often have to absorb a higher portion of costs.
“But Superintendent Jane Russo has said that all special education students will still receive all the services and resources they are entitled to, regardless of district’s budgetary issues.”
Hmmm…
Failure is unacceptable.
Yet with her “track record”, can anyone trust her?
Amazing, when they need to save money they look to the least expensive employees and cut a fraction of the money spent on them. Of course they couldn’t cut that brain trust over at the District Office (brains tucked safely away unused).
Perhaps they ought to look at Administrators in their staffing diagram and where it shows how many employees report to a supervisor or administrator make it the same as the average class size. So if you have 30 kids in a class average you have 30 employees reporting to one supervisor, then 30 supervisors reporting to one administrator, then 30 administrators reporting to one superintendent. This would save them enough to rescind all their layoffs/hours reductions. Then freeze the District Office reclassifications for ten years at a time. That would save even more.
# 3. SAUSD will be saving millions by changing instructional aide positions from full time to part time. SAUSD also saved the class size reduction program and brought back almost all of the RIFed teachers.
#4 I really do understand that medical benefits are expensive. I know that those in the Insurance and Pharmaceutical industries are making record profits year after year. I know that you have to give Teachers a competitive wage and benefit package if you are going to attract conpetent new teachers. I’m glad they saved the Class Size Reduction program even though studies show it doesn’t work.
What I dont understand is if you need to cut medical benefits to save money to save programs why dont you start with the School Board Members? They dont work as much as any part-time employee but they get full benefits – some for life! So if you have to cut someone’s wages and benefits why start at the bottom? So you can hurt the largest possible number of employees? Well this plan does that.
#5
I’d like to verify that. Do school board members get medical benefits? That seems unlikely on the face of it, but confirm it for me if you know.
The district just about doubled or more the cost of benefits to all employees about 2 years ago so most were forced to drop the PPO and go to the HMO programs and I can say from personal experience it sucks!
I question this only because these are board members with full time jobs elsewhere with benefit packages wherever they work. I am hard pressed to believe the district is also giving them medical packages even though I know the district is capable of doing just about anything.
Yes, the School Board Members get the full health benefit package and to my knowledge only John Palacio refuses them. I have to say that, given my limited knowledge of what is going on at SAUSD, John Palacio is the only School Board Member I could support for re-election. He alone stands against the cuts proposed and those approved by the board majority.
As a previous employee who got cut last year for the budget cuts. I know that each school will deeply hurt if the classified staff is cut. They actually need more employees. As the work was divided when I worked there me and my fellow colleagues would spend extra volunteer hours trying to catch up. I personally would go in to work at 6am and stay until 6:30pm even 8:30 sometimes and still have tons of work left to finish. A total of 12+ hours but would only ask for my 8 hr pay. This is how much work needs to be done. You cannot expect the classified staff to continue to do this “charity work” if their hours are going to be cut to minimum and benefits taken away.
I’m sure it will come to be like the other school districts that have many openings that cant be filled because of having 2 part time= 1 regular employee. For example at another district. 2 office managers for one school. 1-morning and 1-afternoon. It wil be a disaster.
Also some of the hours can be a joke. I have already seen sausd posting jobs like 3.95hrs and 5.95hrs. Those .05 hrs calculate to equal 3 minutes. Excuse me, you wont give benefits cause you posted it 3 minutes off. What is the classified suppose to do. Kid comes injured into the health office. “Oh, sorry kid, cant help you yet, I’m only assigned to work 5 hrs and 57 minutes.” Of course they wont do that but my point is they are going to end up working the full 6 hrs or more anyway by having the ill child come in too early or too late, or something similar, but SAUSD is going to decline benefits on a technicality. What happened to morals.
If we really need to cut money from the WHY did Jane Russo get a 4% raise??? Really is she that selfish??? I think that this district really needs to re-evaluate the administrators and the superintendent. This is the reason why were in the hole now. We have many administrators, coordinators, pricipals doing wrong and all they get is an office in the district offfice. Shouldn’t we not waist our funds on those not being ture to SAUSD. Shouldn’t we get rid of them?
But not they just get a nice pretty office with a window at the administration office. This makes me sick. This is were SAUSD needs to cut!!! not the classified emplyoees who do the work that an administrator wouldn’t do. Just because these administrators have degrees doesn’t make them any better. If you ask me some of the administrators that i personally know have no idea what they’re doing, let alone have common sense. They can’t even fax a document to a office or make a copy. It’s just as easy as 1+ 1 math. I say get rid of the lazy administrators who just sit on their behinds all day and tell jokes and act like they know what they’re doing. Well see how long this last.
Layoff notices are now in full swing. These cuts are seriously going to hurt residents in Santa Ana.
What? You mean the “Call to action” had no effect? Hard to believe.
Why were any of the classified staff notified of any lay offs that were going to happen this week. Nobody prept us, or told any of us. we were only aware of the March lay off’s. Were is the communication with our administrators and the union?????
#12
Call it the July surprise, or an early Christmas present. If you have been reading the SAUSD open thread linked on the right border of this blog, you might have seen this coming. Now find a district with an honest board and an ethical union rep. (if there is such a thing)
Yeah..like it will be that easy to just “go find a district” some of these people have been here for years and the bottom line is that they didn’t deserve this..The certificated staff need to stand behind our classified staff! Classified where is your union? What are they doing for you?
Teacher,
When you guys received your layoff notices and fought to get most reinstated, did you not think someone else was going to have to pay the price. It sure as hell wasn’t going to be the administrators. That sort of left classified out in the open because our union has no teeth. The union hasn’t done a thing for most of it’s members in years. They did run around telling us the district couldn’t cut us without negotiating, but I guess they forgot to tell the district.
Even if the union is legally correct it will take several years before they untangle the mess and that is assuming they even try.