March 2010 Archives

The Long Beach school board tonight may vote to eliminate 30 non-teaching positions - mostly full-time ones. A large share of the targeted positions are in maintenance. 

Long Beach City College is considering severely reducing -- and perhaps nearly eliminating -- its summer class offerings this year due to budget cuts, college officials said Thursday.

Instead of offering three summer sessions, as it did in 2009, the college may offer only one, six-week session, occurring mid--June through July, said LBCC Superintendent-President Eloy Ortiz Oakley.

And even that single session likely will be reduced in scope, possibly to include only those vocational courses required during the summer as part of year-round programs, he added.

LOOK FOR THE FULL STORY ON OUR WEB SITE IN A BIT.

The following is the text of a letter LBUSD Superintendent Chris Steinhauser sent last week to employees regarding layoff warning notices.

Dear Colleagues,

I just wanted to acknowledge what a difficult week it's been for so many of you. With great sadness, we began distributing notices of potential layoffs to 1,019 certificated employees. Our state's continuing, multi-billion-dollar cuts to public schools have left us little choice.

FOR MORE CLICK TO GO TO THE JUMP

We are publishing a clarification tomorrow on an article I wrote Thursday. The article contained the following sentence:

In addition, LBUSD teachers who leave their jobs lose all seniority and have to start accumulating it all over again if the they decide to rejoin the district at a later date, (LBUSD spokesman Chris Eftychiou) added.

Here's the clarification: The statement referred to teachers who had VOLUNTARILY left their positions  - basically resigned - in the past and then later returned to the LBUSD by choice. Those are the teachers who had to start accumulating all the seniority anew despite having worked for the LBUSD previously.

 In the article I did not mean for the statement to refer to teachers who may be laid off in May. That situation is different. Laid-off teachers who are hired back to the LBUSD within a certain period of time after being let go would return to the district with the same seniority they had when they were laid off, according to California education code. So that situation is different than teachers who, say, 10 years ago left the LBUSD voluntarily for another district and then came back five years later by choice.

As demonstrated in my last post, some schools saw a high percentage of teachers and certain other employees receiving layoff warning notices this week. Other schools had much lower percentages of employees get notified that they may lose their jobs at the end of the year. What gives? Why are some schools more affected than others?

Which schools are most affected by notices this week warning teachers that their jobs may be eliminated at the end of the school year? 

Bisphenol A (BPA) is a chemical commonly found in polycarbonate plastic bottles and the aluminum lining of food and beverage cans. Production of the chemical started about 40 years ago, a timing that scientists note coincides with increasing asthma rates.

A report by UC Berkeley says so, according to this story in the San Francisco Chronicle:

China, Taiwan, South Korea, Germany, France and Brazil are among the major industrial nations that have continued to boost education spending despite the recession, while the United Kingdom and Ireland have joined the United States in making cuts, said John Aubrey Douglass, who wrote the paper for Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education.