Without asking for public comment before the vote, Shoreline Unified School District trustees unanimously approved a resolution finding “it is in the best interest” of the district to issue lay-off notices to the equivalent of 10.9 full-time teachers this spring. Less than an hour later, at Thursday’s short public meeting at West Marin School, the board unanimously passed another resolution that could cut 5.1 full-time equivalents from the support staff.
Shoreline’s board and administration told the tense room that the resolutions were necessary to appease the Marin County Office of Education. The trustees also reiterated another argument, that the resolutions are only for show, and that the bloodletting will not come to pass.
“We have vetted all of our proposals by the county office of education as to what will be acceptable and what won’t be acceptable to them,” Superintendent Tom Stubbs said. “This is now our beginning point to find another way to do this.”
The “placeholder” resolutions, as the district lawyer described them, include 1.5 full-time equivalent, or F.T.E., physical education teachers, one F.T.E. music teacher, one F.T.E. resource service provider for special education, one F.T.E. high school English teacher, 0.4 F.T.E. high school social studies teacher, six F.T.E. elementary teachers, 2.9 F.T.E. instructional assistants, 1.7 F.T.E. para-educators like library clerks or art assistants, 0.25 F.T.E. groundskeeper and 0.25 F.T.E. custodian.
(On Thursday, union representatives read statements opposing the layoffs, describing low morale and asking the administration to scrutinize the budget’s numbers as the faculty stood in support.)
But the resolutions passed were missing key details the county had requested, including dollar value in savings each layoffs could accomplish. At Thursday’s meeting, chief financial officer Susan Skipp said the exact total the district needs to make up in other cuts—reductions to supplies or the athletic budget, ending trustee health benefits, providing retirement incentives and more—won’t be known until December, when the first interim budget report is released.
That’s a few months before pink slips will be delivered and just a scant month or so before Ms. Skipp leaves the job on Jan. 30.
Ms. Skipp has refused to provide the Light with this year’s total of full-time equivalents for teachers, for non-teaching staff and for administrators and other employees working at the district office. Administrators have used figures from the past 10 years to justify cuts to faculty, but have withheld the current distribution of staff this year.
Teachers have criticized the proposals for sparing the district office from any cuts, and on Thursday high school science teacher Tina Righetti asked why teachers were bearing the burden when only 4.1 F.T.E. were added between 2010-11 and 2013-14. Meanwhile support staff increased by 7.3 F.T.E., the district office hired 1.25 F.T.E. and a principal added a quarter of a full-time position. On Monday, Ms. Skipp told the Light she was busy: “As I’m sure you can understand, I must devote my time to updating the budget for MCOE,” she said in an email.
The district has also delayed its collective bargaining negotiations by another month. The board has met in closed session with Mr. Stubbs to discuss labor negotiations at least six times since the teachers union presented its original proposal in May—on June 3, 19 and 26; Aug. 21; and Sept. 11 and 18—and tentatively plans to sunshine its proposal next month.
With so much unclear, West Marin School mom Donna Faure questioned how prepared the board was to stave off layoffs. “I see that this is a hope, but hope is not a strategy. Strategy is on paper and faces that there are hard cuts that will have to be made,” she told the board.
Trustee Jill Manning Sartori said layoff notices have been rescinded before, but Ms. Faure asked how that would be accomplished this year. “If there was more communication about how that could happen, I would feel better, if there’s some magic money out there that we don’t know about,” she said. “It seems to kind of come and go like this. It’s really hard to pin down, and I’d like to see it pinned down.”
Board president Jane Healy responded. “We’ve had a school district here for 100 years, and we’re gonna have a school district here for another 100 years if I have anything to do with it,” she said. “It is an ongoing process. Please don’t take this as an endpoint.”
Still, Ms. Faure replied, “I don’t feel like we have enough information, and that’s the communication piece that’s missing.”
After trustee Monique Moretti told her the board would be working on “something more concrete, something more real, tangible as far as the number goes, or what realistically we could do” to prevent layoffs, Ms. Healy told Ms. Faure, “I’m going to have to ask you to move along.”