Scores of teachers and community members gathered outside Long Beach Unified’s offices during Wednesday’s board of trustees meeting for a rally against teacher layoffs, organized by the teachers union.
Their message was clear from the signs they carried (“Put students first, not [Superintendent] Jill Baker’s bank account”) to the chants they repeated (“Cuts from the top!”). Rally attendees demanded the district examine administrators’ salaries before they pull teachers from classrooms.
Grace Castro, an organizing chair of the teachers union, addressed the crowd from a raised truck. “We are here because our district is facing a deficit,” she said, referencing LBUSD’s projection that its deficit spending would reach $70 million this school year (recently revised down from $100 million). “Yet every time the district faces financial trouble, cuts are aimed squarely at the classroom.”
Several speakers pointed out that the district has amassed far more than that — about $308 million in ending balances for this school year — in reserves that could offset spending, speakers said.
The fact that Mayor Rex Richardson and three school board trustees, tasked with governing the district, climbed aboard the truck and joined the lineup of speakers, signaled the strength and leverage of the union, which is still in protracted negotiations to reach an overdue contract for teachers.
Richardson explicitly called for “no layoffs in the city of Long Beach,” an important message to send in a moment when education is being dismantled at the federal level, he said.
“You have a board that supports you,” Board of Trustees President Diana Craighead said to the crowd, to which a rally attendee called, “What do you mean support?”
Indeed, many attendees said that despite the comments from their elected officials, teachers have every reason to be concerned about impending layoffs and pointed out that the district has already dispensed with librarians, counselors and a middle school campus. No teacher layoffs have been proposed at this point, but in a budget update published this month, the school district announced that staffing reductions would align with next year’s projected enrollment, which has been steadily declining for decades, and which the district says is driving these cuts.
Yet there has not been “a comparable decrease from Hughes Way,” union vice president Peder Larsen said in an interview, referring to the street address of LBUSD administrative offices. Cutting teachers should be a last resort, Larsen said, because those cuts hurt students.
Poly High School students Paryss Wills and Rylee Hildreth said they attended the rally for that reason: because teachers have had such a significant impact on their lives.
“When teachers are cut, students are the ones who lose, and our students need us,” said Janice Pope, an English teacher at Cabrillo High School. She said she is worried about increasing class sizes and the inequity of losing resources at a school like hers that serves many marginalized students.
Pope has been teaching in the district for more than two decades; because of her seniority, she said she is unlikely to be laid off. But she fears her former student, Monica Nazario, who said she was inspired to become a teacher at Cabrillo because of instructors like Pope, is at greater risk. A layoff notice would mean Nazario would lose her health benefits and her ability to pay rent, she said.
Nazario said she comes from a family of immigrants and was the first among them to go to college — possible “because of Ms. Pope and because of other teachers at Cabrillo that really encouraged me,” she said. Nazario has made it her life’s goal to give back to her community in the same way, showing up for her students, who she says depend on her every day.
“It’s my calling,” Nazario said. “I’m here for the kids and no one else.”