Laid off Santa Ana Unified School District instructional aides protested yesterday at SAUSD headquarters, over on Chestnut and Grand in Santa Ana. One of the protesters ended his hunger strike that had begun on Monday, as we previously reported.
The O.C. Register also reported yesterday that the SAUSD has rescinded most of their teacher layoffs. They originally laid off over 500 teachers. Now only 13 will be laid off (talk about an unlucky number!).
For some reason the O.C. Register has NOT reported another story we covered yesterday – that the SAUSD has utterly bungled their summer school program as hundreds of students have been turned away.
Clearly folks in town are waking up to the obvious – the SAUSD administration is LAME and should be tossed out. By the way, I am told that NO SAUSD administrators have been laid off and NONE of them have taken any pay cuts. Figures. Keep in mind that the SAUSD Superintendent is paid more than any other Superintendent in the county, even though this is her first Superintendent job, she doesn’t speak Spanish and she doesn’t have a doctorate in education. If anyone ought to take a pay cut it is SAUSD Superintendent Jane Russo!
As someone else pointed out Russo’s lack of an Ed.D is not really a big deal. Her lack of management skill is. A few like to blame this on Mijares, but he has been gone a long time now. This mess is purely Russo’s along with the board majority.
Schools are for teaching kids so I understand why classified takes a larger hit than teachers. I don’t think it is fair, however, that some classified departments are untouchable while others are cut to the bone. I also would like to see the state do an audit of every district office management job to determine how much waste and duplication exists.
I believe all RIF’d teachers at the intermediate and high school level now have their jobs back. Of course, I also believe they are getting them back at the expense of the instructional assistants. I think that part of the reason is that the district couldn’t handle another class size scandal and if the teachers weren’t there, we would have opened our classrooms in the fall with 50+ students. There are already ongoing grievances regarding last year’s class sizes. The instructional assistants don’t lower class size. It’s so sad because they will never be able to get the same quality of Instructional Assistant for a 3.75 hour day with no benefits. Who can really afford to do that? I know Irvine has a lot of parents who take these types of positions. But I’m sure it’s not for the money, they probably don’t even need the money (if they did, they’d work full-time). I don’t think we have too many of those types of parents in SAUSD.
Folks.
The original 10 percent, acrosss the board, budget cut proposed by Arnold was a scare tactic. I was told that it was never going to be that heavy in the area of teachers.
Statewide I read that a new economic forecast anticipates a loss of 30,000 jobs in 2008.
Closer to home I have family members and close friends who are part of the count. One white collar manager who has been unemployed for over a year.
That said, the downturn has impacted a lot more people than those seen protesting in this report
I may be totally out of line here but, if I am please explain it to me rather than ripping me a new one.
Way back when I was in school, and dirt was new, we didn’t have teachers aides. We had about 30 students per classroom and we got a decent education. I had some really great teachers, and some not so great ones too. Overall however I had a very good education, especially when I look at what my daughter is getting or those who are out and about, as younger adults, I see daily.
It doesn’t seem to matter what school either, some of those from Newport Harbor don’t seem to have any better education than those from Los Amigos or Sunny Hills, different, but not appreciably better.
So my disconnect here is why are teachers aides so important now, when we got through all of this in the old days without that extra expense and personnel. I don’t understand either why the schools and teachers think they are somehow special outside of the rest of societies downsizing.
My family has lost about 30% or more of our yearly income in the last two years. I know many others who have as well. Right now the economy is hurting all of us. I fail to understand why this is such a difficult concept for the union members to grasp, especially those who are arguably better educated.
The Classified union really sold their members down a long time ago.
There ARE jobs that are still paying all benefits and all hours, but the union hasn’t helped their members who have seniority understand this. The SH (severely handicapped) classes have many new hires in place. If you are a special education assistant, then chances are that you may be intersted in working with the severely disabled population in order to keep your old benefits and hours.
Sure, your union might have to oversee “bumping” of the just hired personnel, but that’s too bad. You need to insist on your rights of seniority. Assistants that have been paying dues for years and years should never roll over and let the new hires keep jobs that legally they are entitled to.
If you’re a special education assistant and you don’t mind changing a few diapers or helping to feed students during your workday, then you should contact your union asap.
These jobs are currently IN summer school session. Federal funding protects these jobs under ADA and other umbrellas. If you are running around starving yourself and not actively canvassing the programs that currently ARE IN SESSION, then you still don’t have a clue.
Your union’s not going to let you know about this option. You’ve got to go demand it. Good luck to all.
Carl (#4) you are not at all out of line questioning school practices. Nearly everyone has first-hand knowledge of public schools having been a student in them for 13 years. You also pay for them and are asked to make financial and school leadership decisions during elections. Everyone should be involved in the discussion. Nevertheless, administrators go to great lengths to hide school operations from the public. You’ve asked valid questions:
1) Why are instructional assistants necessary now while in the past we did fine without them? School leaders not only mismanage finances, they mismanage instructional aides. Teachers don’t request instructional assistants, they simply show up in classrooms having been assigned there following some rules or policies unknown to most teachers. Once assigned, the teacher can use the aide in any way he or she sees fit – or just let them sit there in the classroom like any student. I see a lot of “just sitting” classroom aides in the high school. Several weeks into the semester, most high school students have a far better grasp of the subject matter than the extra adult in the classroom. Assistants can be very useful in the elementary grades where you have a broad range of maturities and academic levels in the same classroom. The teacher can work closely with one small group, while an aide can supervise the class work done by others. Of course, assistants are absolutely essential for certain special ed programs.
2) What is so special about teachers and schools that they should be exempt from the downsizing suffered by the rest of the community? Teaching is just a job like any other, such as surgeon or aircraft mechanic, where a bad job done can result in serious harm to others. A difference is in the case of the former, the hurt is immediate and you know who to blame; with bad teachers the hurt is masked by time and its difficult to identify individual culprits. I’ve spoke to and know of many inner-city graduates who went off to college with high goals only to find they hadn’t been prepared to compete with the more affluent students. A second difference is while you can downsize a faculty, you can’t downsize the students. You noted that you did well in school in classes of about 30, and I can teach well in a class of 30; all our classrooms are designed for a maximum of 32. When you exceed 32, you have to abandon a curriculum based on best teaching practices and base them on class management and student control. We have generally been starting out the year with most classes in the high 30’s to low 40’s in the secondary schools.
Actually, I’m in error, as Art will be quick to point out, regarding the downsizing of students in schools. As the quality of education in schools goes down, the dropout rate of students goes up.
Mr. Overmyer,
Without “ripping you a new one” I’d like to explain why Instructional Assistants are invaluable at my site. First of all, they are there only for Special Education students. At my school, Special Ed students are placed in the regular classroom 100% of the day. The IA’s are there to provide support to those students, which enables the teacher to spend time with all of the students, rather than with only a few struggling students. It would be wonderful if we only had 30 students in a class, it’s been over 10 years since I’ve had a class of 30. Last year I had over 40 in three of my classes the entire year, and yes, it makes a huge difference. With the currents cuts, there will be no way to have a Special Ed person in the classes with Special Ed students, it is not physically possible for the teachers to be in those classrooms at the same time. Our Instructional Assistants were well trained and very caring, they took the time to help the Special Ed students succeed in what is required by law, the “least restrictive environment”. Without this support, the regular classroom for these students now becomes a much more restrictive environment because teachers cannot possibly meet the needs of these students and the other 35+ students in the classroom.
Thank you for the education. I greatly appreciate it.
I am surprised that special ed is mainstreamed, as we called it, I’m not sure if that’s good or bad for either parties. Your further input on that would be welcome.
I’m not sure that drop out rate is either directly or indirectly attributable to class size, however, I will grant that it would certainly change the teaching methods in some classes.
As I understand it enrollment in SAUSD is declining overall. Is this correct? That should indicate fewer students in each classroom, right?
As I see it, right now, what’s really wrong is the lack of day to day, competent administration from a district level, in planning and utilizing resources available. Not withstanding the lies that have been told to the community about some of the new schools and park usage here on the westend of town. So I am guessing that other such miscommunications occurred with others as well.
Am I missing something in this?
Carl –
Watch out or you’ll get sucked into the black hole that is the truth about SAUSD. It’s safer if you stay behind the yellow line and keep your hands close to your body!
SMS
Mainstreaming works very well for most mild/moderate Special Ed students in my experience. The problems come when the student is not successful and should be in a different type of program but the parent or the administration insists on mainstreaming.
Class size has changed teaching methods in such drastic ways but this is an issue no one is willing to discuss. The district continues to provide teacher training expecting teachers to “differentiate” instruction for various types of learners even though it is virtually impossible with classes of 40 student. So what has happened is that every year teachers have adapted their methods in order to survive in the situation. It is not uncommon for teachers to spend a school year with students and still not know many of their names. When you have a little over 40 minutes and 40 students, it’s easy for them to kind of “blur” together. Teaching becomes more lecture and less interactive and the teachers and students do not enjoy school. Teachers shift to survival mode and actually grade very few of their students’ assignments (ever tried to grade 240 papers?), students figure this out and the quality of the work declines. This did not happen overnight, rather by an increase of one to two students per class every year for the last seven or eight years.
I’m not sure what the answer is to these problems but I think that the SAUSD administration is aware that the class size problem has hit the boiling point and due to this, we will be seeing some cuts in other places. I also believe that when enrollment declines, class size goes up. The district no longer receives funding for those students and they reduce the number of teachers.
Carl,
“Anon teacher” is right-on in the #10 comment. Let me add it’s a pleasure to have someone truly curious about what actually goes on in Santa Ana’s classrooms. There appears to be no one at the Register or the LA Times – OC interested … nor in the leadership at SAUSD.
The term “special education” covers students with a broad range of learning difficulties, most of which shouldn’t at all require them to be taken from regular classrooms. Many involve reading difficulties such as dyslexia. I greatly recommend reading Victor Villasenor’s “Burro Genius”, in which he describes his frustrations as a Mex-Amer kid going to school in Oceanside, CA, trying to read when “the words all wiggled like worms” on the page. In classes where reading isn’t central to learning: math, science, arts, industrial arts … these kids do fine. The frustration of the same kids in English, history, foreign languages is often misinterpreted as behavioral problems if the root cause isn’t found. The instructional aide is critical here.
Declining enrollment and number of classrooms have little to do with class size – it’s all about money and how you prioritize the districts budget. About 2/3 the budget is payroll. Here, do a little simple math – it’s interesting. At any moment in a school day, students will be spread throughout classrooms with about 2000 teachers, 27 per teacher on average; some will have 20 students, others 40. (Though we’re listed having about 2600 teachers, some teachers don’t teach and some will be on their 1 hr prep period). Budget in the red? …no problem, have each teacher take just 1 more student. That’s 2,000 students now for which we don’t need teachers, and at now an average of 28 students per teacher, you can dismiss 71 teachers. Salary and benefits for an average teacher runs about $80,000/yr, so that 1 extra student per classroom, saves district the cost of 71 teachers, which cuts payroll about 5.7 million dollars. That’s real money. Of course the temptation is to do it again … and again … and we have done just that over the last two decades. But an average of 1 student extra per teacher, is not 1 extra in reality. The 20-to-1 classes have to stay under 20 by law or lose state funding. Numbers in advanced classes (calculus, trig, AP/honors classes) stay the same. The 1-extra-on-average equates to 3-up for many other classes, such as basic algebra: 32 to 35 one year …35 to 38 a couple years later… 38 to 41 a couple years later (now our qualified math teachers are bailing out to other districts), and now 41 to 44, saving gobs of money two ways, one from class size savings, and the other from low-cost, unqualified substitute teachers with no experience teaching algebra, and no experience managing discipline in a class packed with 44 students (remember that the trouble-makers who failed algebra the previous year are back again in that packed classroom). And you don’t think this effects students’ decisions to give up and drop out?
I’m beginning to see the bigger picture here. It does sound* overwhelming.
My hope is to broaden the scope of understanding what the real issues are here. Even if it’s not my school district, I don’t see anyone stepping up to the plate and asking, that’s sad!
That my be the underlying problem for SAUSD, nobody understands what the problems really are, so no real world answers are brought forward. Everyone keeps pointing fingers and not fixing anything.
*that must be that sucking sound Sarah (9) warned me about 😉
Carl, thank you for caring, and asking.
SAUSD High school teacher(s), thank you for your honesty. We elementary teachers truly try to support you be sending on students with strong foundations, but our best efforts are often derailed by self-serving administrative decisions.
Carl, in “our day” most students came from English speaking homes with literate parents who equalled the educators’ high-expectations for success…not today.
Carl, in that time, administrators were facilitators who viewed their job as facilitators to support the educators in the classroom…not today.
Today, the students we teach present many challenges, the parents too, and unfortunately the administration is often the worst.
Consider, just at our site, administration has chosen:
1) To ignore input from veteran teachers about how to implement educational programs.
2) To never hire a literacy coach even though funding is provided (for over two years now).
3) To use the Bilingual Resource “Teacher” as a third administrator (even though no admin. cred.) doing administrative jobs.
4) To cut students’ time in the computer lab by 50% this past year (from two, to just one 35 minute session a week). [Because the administrator thinks that computer time is just “play time” and doesn’t provide any real eduational experience.] The computer lab sits half empty most of the day, and too often completely unused. In this day and age, don’t our students need technology more than ever!?
5) To allow the Bilingual Resource “Teacher” to bully/use the computer lab tech. as a “personal secretary” for administrative jobs.
6) To routinely pull the “Safety Net” teacher from teaching for administrative duties.
7) To ignore teaching staff input at SSC meetings.
8) To impede/delay identification of students needing special education services for years(because once identified, it costs extra money).
Staff morale is another HUGE problem primarily due to the lack of professional respect continually shown by SAUSD administration.
Carl, I love teaching. Teaching students is a joy. If someday teachers could run their school’s programs, I believe you would see some incredible results.