Mending wounds of local school cuts

All 26 teachers in the Wheatland Elementary School District who received layoff notices have filed for a hearing to review their job status, a school district trustee says.

"The California Teachers Association is going to be very busy," Trustee Nicole Crabb said Thursday.

She cited the number of instructors in California receiving notices — and the state teachers union providing an attorney to teachers for the review held by the state Office of Administrative Hearings before an administrative law judge.

Mike Myslinski, spokesman for the CTA, said the union anticipates being busy.

"We urge every teacher who gets a pink slip to demand a hearing," Myslinski said.

A total of 26,553 pink slips have already been issued statewide, according to the teachers union.

Gay Todd, superintendent of the Marysville Joint Unified School District, said Thursday that she expects a majority of teachers in the district receiving layoff notices to ask for a hearing.

Marysville trustees have approved notices for 65 employees, most of them teachers. Retirements by other teachers have already allowed the Marysville school district to rescind six such notices, Todd said.

Hearings about layoffs are held at the offices of the school district where teachers work, Todd said. An attorney representing the school district is present along with the teacher's attorney in the review of issues that include teacher seniority and credentials.

"It's almost exactly like a courtroom," Todd said.

Herb Cooley, who is also a trustee for the Yuba City Unified School District, spoke Friday about his success with a 2007 hearing involving his teaching agriculture at Sutter High School after a "reduction in force" at the high school district.

"The administrative law judge process is extremely fair," Cooley said. "Their rulings are pretty detailed."

The 26 teachers receiving layoff notices in Wheatland represent a third of the teachers in the district.

Trustee Crabb said the percentage of teachers is higher in Wheatland because, along with state cuts in school funding, the district faces declining enrollment.

"Everything has hit Wheatland all at once," she said.

About 50 fewer students have been enrolled each year over the past decade, Crabb said, in part because of a drop in the number of military families with school-age children living at Beale Air Force Base.

A total of 1,230 students were enrolled in the district as of February, she said.

A March 2 school board meeting in Wheatland — about issues including the layoff notices and a proposal to merge Bear River Middle School and Wheatland Elementary —was heated, Crabb said, and included yelling by some people attending the meeting. That reaction principally involved issues surrounding class size reduction, she said.

Crabb, whose children attend district schools, said the layoff issue is difficult.

"It's extremely hard," she said. "I've lost many nights of sleep."

Teachers who've received layoff notices, the trustee said, are people she knows.

"They're not just names on a paper," Crabb said.

Contact Appeal-Democrat reporter Ryan McCarthy at 749-4707 or rmccarthy@appealdemocrat.com.