Layoff hearings in the Anaheim Union High School District will continue for five more days throughout the month of May after school board trustees voted earlier this year to let go over 100 teachers amid decreasing enrollment.
The layoffs come amid expiring federal COVID relief funds for schools, declining enrollment at public schools across OC and the country and as California faces a budget shortfall.
Last week, a three-day hearing at Katella High School was held before an administrative law judge in an effort by district officials to exempt some teachers from California’s seniority based teacher layoff policy – which they say could impact a host of programs in the district including AP.
The hearings are expected to continue on May 2, 14, 20, 22 and 23, according to the California Teacher Association’s magazine, California Educator.
Arielle Aguirre, an English teacher at Anaheim High School for six years, said in a Tuesday phone interview that the hearings have been discouraging and disorganized, with district staff seeming unprepared.
“Just hearing all the reasons why they’re letting teachers go or why they’re keeping some teachers, while not actually doing their due diligence, it’s really demoralizing for the years of experience that teachers have to just be reduced to a name on a paper,” she said.
“Everything that we’ve all worked for doesn’t mean anything at the end of the day,” Aguirre added. “That’s what it feels like that we don’t matter. The community doesn’t matter.”
Michael Matsuda, the district superintendent, said in a Tuesday phone interview that the hearings are about ensuring everyone’s due process when weighing who might get laid off.
“It just gets very complex, like a big jigsaw puzzle and it’s foreseeable that there will be human error and that’s why you have the hearings, because we want to ensure and minimize any sort of human error when you’re talking about people’s lives and careers,” he said.
One teacher who wished to stay anonymous for fear of losing their job echoed Aguirre’s comments, saying they worry about their bills and taking care of their family. The teacher also said it feels like some people are being cherry picked by district staff to stay.
In March, publicly elected school board trustees voted unanimously for the layoffs after the loss of over 3,500 students since the 2017-18 school year and projections that enrollment will continue to plummet in the next couple of years.
[Read: Two OC School Districts Hit With Layoffs, Personnel Shakeups]
It was a decision that meant 119 teachers were going to lose their jobs at the end of the school year and about 253 teachers were notified that they may be one of those people who gets laid off.
Matsuda said that the number has since dropped to 62 positions, but could still change due to retirements.
Anaheim Secondary Teachers Association, the local teachers union, has been holding rallies at schools in the district this week against the decision by the district to layoff teachers and increase class sizes.
Geoff Morganstern, president of the union, did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
An online petition against the layoffs garnered 3,764 signatures as of Tuesday afternoon.
Skipping: The Impacts of Last In, First Out
In California, state law requires teacher layoffs to be conducted on a “Last In, First Out” basis in retaining educators based on seniority if employment cuts happen.
District officials may deviate from laying off on a seniority basis or “skip” to comply with equal protection laws or if the teacher has special training to teach a course that more senior teachers do not have.
The hearings have been called by Anaheim Union officials in part to try to exempt some teachers from the layoffs in an effort to protect programs like Dual Language immersion, AP courses, the International Baccalaureate program, ethnic studies and community school teachers.
“It’s not about protecting individual teachers. It’s really about protecting programs,” Matsuda said.
Aguirre said the layoffs should be based on seniority to avoid animosity and competition between teachers, any teacher could be trained to teach specialized programs and she herself is trained to teach AP level courses.
“It’s not like some teachers have the opportunity at their school sites to teach the courses that they’re trained in. There are instances where newer teachers are just given these roles as opposed to teachers that have been here for years,” Aguirre said.
Concerns regarding seniority based layoff policies at school districts and the impacts they can have aren’t only occurring in Anaheim.
A 2023 report conducted by Educators for Excellence, a teacher advocacy organization, and TNTP, a national nonprofit, found that teachers of color are more likely to feel the impacts of seniority based layoffs.
“Teachers of color have grown from representing only 13% of the teaching workforce in 1988 to 20% today,” reads the report. “Because teachers of color are more likely to be new to teaching, they are also more likely to lose their jobs if layoffs occur.”
According to the report, teachers of color are nearly 50% more likely to be in their first or second year than are white teachers across the country.
According to state data, roughly 70% of Anaheim Union High School Districts 29,000 students are Latino.
Data on teachers’ ethnicities were not available for the 2022-23 school year, but 793 of the close to 1,200 teachers were white in the 2018-2019 school year.
Hearings Disrupt Education in AUHSD
Germaine Neumann-Chau, a parent of a senior at Anaheim High School, said last week’s hearings have disrupted schools while teachers come before the judge with finals around the corner.
She said her son has an AP exam next week and his teacher has had to go to the hearings instead of helping him and his classmates prepare.
“This is crunch time for them,” Neumann-Chau said. “It’s happening at every school in our district and probably affecting every single student in the district.”
“The school district is not prioritizing the education of our students.”
She said if district officials really cared about programs like AP they would invest in them and support them and not waste money on special contracts.
Sophia Hall, a junior at Anaheim High School, said in a phone call Tuesday that she worries about how much time her teachers are missing as finals approach and raised concerns that layoffs could create larger class sizes.
“Our teachers really need to be able to work with some students individually quite often and that’s hard enough right now with the current class sizes,” she said.
Aguirre, the English teacher, said substitutes have had to take over the classes which is costing the district money and other teachers are having to cover for their colleagues which cuts into their planning and grading time.
“It’s difficult for students to get the education that they need especially at the end of the school year,” she said. “Some of us will be at the hearings during finals week for three days.”
Superintendent Matsuda said the dates for the hearings were chosen by the administrative law judge and not in the district’s control and didn’t know where the hearings would take place or at what time.
“We would have liked this to be less disruptive with graduation coming up,” he said “lt’s tremendous weight on our substitutes in terms of coverage.”
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.
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