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School
Officials Rally Against Proposed Cuts
Hundreds of
Compton Unified employees protest Schwarzenegger’s proposed
budget with human chain demonstration outside district headquarters
By
Allison Jean Eaton
Bulletin Staff Writer
COMPTON – Drivers
on Santa Fe Avenue honked their horns in a show of solidarity with
hundreds of teachers, principals and other district personnel as school
officials last week protested proposed state budget cuts.
Statewide, K-12 public education stands to lose $4.8 million if Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget is passed, leaving school
districts scrambling to heed off the move. Higher education stands
to lose another $1.3 billion.
The cuts come as part of the governor’s attempt to tackle a projected
$20 billion budget shortfall.
Simultaneously, a large body of research and a report by the governor’s
Committee on Excellence in Education conclude that additional funding
is necessary to provide California’s students with access to
a quality education.
According to many of those gathered outside Compton Unified School
District (CUSD) headquarters last Wednesday afternoon, the cuts spell
doom for students throughout California, especially those in low-income,
underserved areas – like those attending CUSD schools.
“We’re a Title 1 school district, so we are saying to the
state today, ‘No’,” said Dr. Jacqueline Sanderline,
principal at Carver Elementary.
Title 1 schools are determined by the concentration of students within
the school who are eligible for meal subsidies, a program in which
families with income levels at or below the poverty level are qualified
to participate.
At Sanderline’s school in Watts, 100 percent of the student body
qualifies for free or reduced-price meals. Many come from single-parent
households or are in foster or kinship care. Roughly 70 percent speak
English as a second language.
Such stats are mirrored at a majority of schools districtwide. For
this reason, the district is already at a disadvantage, according to
many of the teachers The Bulletin spoke to that day.
Waving signs, blowing whistles and chanting in groups, the protesters
of all ages stood shoulder to shoulder in a human chain along the entire
west side of the 500 block of Santa Fe and along nearly half of the
east side of the street for roughly an hour.
“We’re not going to have the kinds of things we need for our kids,” said
fourth grade teacher Bonnie Coronado. “We’re not going to have supplemental
materials. We’re not going to be able to move into new technology.”
Coronado is also worried about her job. Although she’s been a teacher for
years, this is her first year with Compton Unified. And as fellow teacher Amy
Lee Duprey put it, “everyone knows the newest hires are the first to go.”
The state earlier this year sent out approximately 18,000 preliminary pink slips
to California teachers, custodians and support staff. The final layoff notices
are expected to be sent out this month, meaning thousands of teachers and other
school employees across the state could find themselves jobless come next school
year.
Duprey, a kindergarten teacher, said teachers are already struggling to provide
students with even the basics like books, paper and pencils. She can’t
imagine to what degree the budget cuts will exacerbate the problem.
A kindergarten teacher, she said she teaches her 20 young students by herself
because the district cannot afford to pay for a teacher’s assistant, something
that’s often a staple. According to Duprey, it can often be draining and
hectic.
“A lot of our kids have behavioral and emotional problems,” she said. “They’re
in foster care or their parents are out of the picture. Some of them have even
seen their parents killed, so they need a lot of extra attention.”
Willowbrook Middle School’s Adam Young, another first-year hire who teaches
6th grade math and science, is worried about his job, as well.
“Yes, my job will be on the line first,” he said. “I’m
nervous,
definitely nervous, being a first-year teacher just out of school… I’m
not sure if I’ll have a job next year.”
Rogelio Soriano has taught science at Willowbrook for 11 years. His main concern
if the cuts go through is class size. He said his school was planning to reduce
class sizes to 25 students per teacher next year in an attempt to further raise
test scores. But if the district loses teachers, that won’t be possible.
“My main concern is the students,” said Sheryn Hoff, who teaches
math and
science at Willowbrook. “Right now it’s very difficult to teach in
a classroom with 35 students. To reduce our class size to 25, it’s much
more easy to teach.”
But fewer teachers on the district’s payroll would mean larger class sizes.
Willowbrook’s Mrs. Prince-Taylor, who declined to give her first name,
said with larger class sizes, it will take teachers longer to assess, and therefore
meet the needs of, each individual student in the class.
“Right now, when we get those kids in, it takes us approximately three
to six weeks to assess each child. When you have 40 kids in a classroom, it can
take
up to three or four months, so the school year is halfway gone,” said Prince-Taylor.
She predicts that budget cuts will equate to even more students who “fall
through the cracks.”
California is already among the top five states with the largest class sizes
and ranks 47th in per-pupil funding, according to Education Week.
Sanderlin, principal at Carver, said she’s most worried about losing the
array of intervention programs she’s launched at the Watts-Willowbrook
school – programs that have proven themselves to make a marked difference
in the educational outcomes of some of her most underprivileged students that
are illustrated in yearly test score gains.
“It’s the interventions that help our children who are in most need
outside
of general funding,” she said. “The after school programs, my Gentlemen’s
Scholars program, my Young Ladies of Unity program, after school tutoring.
“That (losing the programs) will affect us greatly, and I don’t know
how
we would be able to provide them otherwise,” she said.
“Today does more than just make a statement to the state,” she said. “This
is a unified effort. Every CUSD employee is here. No titles, no ranks, no big
I’s and little you’s. So I think this is uniting us more so than
it is making a statement to the governor.
“They’ve always had cuts, but never like this,” she continued. “It’s
forcing us to think out of the box. If it (the cuts) does pass, it forces us
to think creatively. But there’s only so much creativity one can come up
with for ideas on how we are going to provide additional resources for our children.”
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