Lillian Mongeau

Young Oakland teachers listen to a recent Oakland City Council debate on layoffs

Oakland School Board members voted to send notices to 538 teachers warning of potential layoffs, renewed four charter schools, and approved the second interim budget in a marathon eight-hour meeting Wednesday night.

The teacher lay-off notices pulled the largest crowd and the most heated opinions. In order to comply with state law, the district has until March 15 to issue notices to teachers who are in danger of being laid off. Actual layoff notices will not be issued until May 15. However, district officials likely won’t know if they have the money to avoid such layoffs until June, when they hope voters will approve Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed tax extension.

Right now, no one is even sure the measure will be on the ballot. The state Legislature must approve putting the budget to a popular vote, something they were scheduled to decide this week. Amid speculation that this approval was unlikely, Brown announced yesterday that he would hold the measure back from consideration by the Legislature until an undetermined later date.

Meanwhile, Oakland teachers are girding themselves for what would be the most extensive layoffs in years. The law requires that teachers with the least experience in the classroom be laid off first. And for some schools with a particularly young staff, this policy could gut current programs.

“This will dismantle everything we’ve been there for,” said Anna Blake, a first grade teacher from Futures Elementary in East Oakland. Blake has been teaching for four years. “We recognize that everyone has to take cuts, but it’s unjust that we will take the most of these cuts in low-income communities,” she said.

Blake cited her school’s huge gains on standardized tests over the last several years and her colleagues’ efforts to create after school opportunities for their students. A majority of teachers at Futures have five or fewer years of experience and they wrote to the president of the teachers’ union, Betty Olson-Jones, asking that their school not be disrupted quite so massively as it would be if nearly all its teachers were laid off.

“I take really seriously their concern,” Olson-Jones said. But she was not willing to consider changing the union’s stance on seniority. “In the interest of our students we stand with senior teachers in supporting the seniority rule,” she said.

Some board members disagreed. Gary Yee and Noel Gallo stated outright that they didn’t think seniority was the best measure for teacher effectiveness. Yee, who taught for 10 years in Oakland, said his fifth year teaching was probably his strongest and that he “tapered off” from his fifth to his tenth. “So who’s to say where in a career path the best teaching is?” Yee asked.