Lillian Mongeau

Jazmin Marin, a student at Futures Elementary in East Oakland chats with her teacher, Meredith Iserson, during recess on March 22. Iserson stood to be laid off before Wednesday's announcements that elementary school layoffs had been averted.

More than two dozen Oakland schools that showed significant improvement after the implementation of broad reforms stand to lose at least half their teachers if planned budget cuts go into effect.

At least three of those schools could lose over 95 percent of their teachers, according to the Oakland Unified School District and principals at those schools. The schools facing the most drastic losses are located primarily in East or West Oakland, the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods.

“It’s not about the teachers at this point,” said Anna Blake, a first-grade teacher at Futures Elementary School, which may see its entire staff, including the principal, wiped out. “This is about the kids.”

The projections outlined by the district mean that many Oakland students face the prospect of not seeing a single familiar face when they return next fall unless Gov. Jerry Brown and the state legislature reach a budget compromise.

Click here to see a chart of the potential impact of layoffs on each Oakland school. 

California’s state education code calls for layoffs to be based entirely on seniority. Some cities are finding ways around this, but most teachers unions support the policy.

But principals and teachers at schools like Futures Elementary say the seniority provision fails to take their individual circumstances into account.

Futures, like all of the most-improved schools threatened with significant cuts, was redesigned in 2007 in a wave of reforms focused on developing small, community-focused schools.

Five of the schools facing draconian cuts are among the most improved in the district, boasting 100-point gains on state standardized tests since the reforms went into effect.

Before 2007, students in the Futures neighborhood would have attended Lockwood Elementary, with an enrollment of nearly 700. Today, students walk to the same campus but belong to one of two smaller schools housed there: Futures and Community United Elementary.

Lockwood teachers had to re-interview for their jobs at the new schools if they wanted to stay in the same neighborhood. Many left, and younger teachers filled those spots. So, when the district issued 538 notices warning of potential lay-offs on March 15, Futures, and other redesigned schools like it, were hit hardest. 

The president of the Oakland teachers’ union, Betty Olson-Jones, said she feels for Futures teachers. But, she said, the decision to hire those teachers in the first place was primarily based on the lower salaries they commanded.

“You ended up with a number of situations where principals, for reasons of budget, decided they wanted all new teachers on staff,” Olson-Jones said.

That is not true, principals at the new schools said. 

“When we started our school we offered positions to many of the teachers on our site but they didn’t want to take a chance on us,” said Leo Fuchs, the principal of Learning Without Limits Elementary in East Oakland. “We had no choice but to hire outside the district,” he said.

Fuchs stands to lose 16 of his 17 teachers next year. While some of his teachers have experience in other districts, those years do not count towards seniority in Oakland.

Blake’s job—and that of other teachers at Futures and the other schools—could yet be saved if the governor is able to reach a budget compromise or win a tax extension that would eliminate the need for more cuts. Final lay-off notices are set to go out in May. This means the teachers could officially lose their jobs and then, if the money comes through, be asked back in June.

The district is working to minimize the number of May notices by offering early retirement plans to veteran employees and tallying the number of teachers who plan to leave their jobs for personal reasons, schools’ spokesman Troy Flint said. This won’t lower the overall number of teachers the district stands to lose, but more of the departures will be voluntary.

“We’ve exhausted all our other measures to keep the cuts away from the classroom,” Flint said.

Flint said the district laid off over 100 district employees last year, used up one-time grants from sources like the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, drew down its debt and dug into its reserves, all in the hope that “our legislators would come to their senses and not keep implementing these deep cuts.”

Stephen Daubenspeck, the principal at Futures Elementary, said he recognized the difficult financial situation the district was in, but didn’t think that justified such drastic cuts at individual schools.

“In my opinion, Oakland has to distribute this problem fairly,” Daubenspeck said.

On Thursday, after protests by teachers and administrators at Futures and other schools, the district said it would make a priority of lessening the “disproportionate impact of teacher layoffs.”

No matter what happens with the budget, Futures and Learning Without Limits will stay open. If the tax extension money does not come through, senior teachers who are currently teaching elsewhere in the district will replace the young teachers who are laid off. Full replacement will not be possible, so class size will skyrocket.

“Even if every teacher who replaced our current teachers was stellar, the loss of the relationships that exist currently is stunning,” Fuchs said.

 “We cannot pretend teachers are cogs in a machine that can be replaced,” Fuchs said.

Oakland is not the only city in California where rapidly improving schools are facing dramatic cuts.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Los Angeles Unified School District last winter on behalf of students facing a similar situation, said Brooks Allen, Director of Education Advocacy for the ACLU of Southern California. They claimed protection for specific schools could be granted within the bounds of the education code because the law allows seniority to be disregarded “for purposes of maintaining or achieving compliance with constitutional requirements related to equal protection of the laws."

The ACLU argued that L.A. Unified should protect individual schools from being disproportionately affected by lay-offs. After lengthy hearings, the district settled the case and agreed to protect improving schools in low-income districts from disproportionate layoffs. The union has appealed the settlement.

In Sacramento, school officials determined the ACLU’s interpretation of the law was correct and decided to protect six schools that are considered the superintendent’s priority schools.

Principals, teachers and parents in Oakland are paying close attention to these precedent-setting decisions. Over 100 parents associated with the community organizing group, Oakland Community Organizations, met recently with the attorneys from the L.A. suit to learn more about the way a lawsuit against the district would proceed, said Ron Snyder, OCO’s staff director.

For now, there are not plans to pursue this option, which Snyder called a blunt instrument. But the idea will be revisited if their efforts at negotiations and compromise don’t work, Snyder said.

Oakland Unified School District handed out 538 layoff notices to teachers and counselors on March 15 after cutting $122 million from its budget in the 2010-11 school year. Final layoff decisions will be determined in May.

The Bay Citizen compiled the following chart from OUSD’s website, which now has 17 pages related to layoff notices. We calculated the percent change on API scores from 2007 to 2010 based on information in an OUSD table.