No teachers will be laid off from the Anaheim Union High School District this year after over 100 instructors learned they were the target of cost-saving staffing reductions.
In March, the AUHSD board decided that decreasing enrollment required the termination of 119 teachers by the end of the current school year. Last month, that number dropped to 62 positions slated for layoffs.
[Read: Anaheim Union High School District Continues Struggling With Layoffs]
But last week, district Superintendent Michael Matsuda and Anaheim Secondary Teachers Association President Geoff Morganstern released a joint statement that there won’t be any layoffs this year.
“Since March, members of our District community have advocated to maintain the District’s current staffing levels as they are,” reads the May 10 statement. “After deep consideration and dialogue among stakeholder groups, the Board of Trustees has decided to rescind its previously approved decision to reduce permanent and probationary teachers.”
The school board’s reversal comes after the district has lost over 3,500 students since the 2017-2018 school year. That’s approximately the same number of students that both a high school and junior high school could enroll.
Teachers were supposed to be laid off to help offset lost revenue due to fewer student enrollments in recent years.
Morganstern said about 50 teachers are leaving the district at the end of the school year because of retirements, resignations or the end of temporary contracts.
He said that these disappearing positions will help with declining enrollment.
“It kind of puts a pause on things for a year for us to work very transparently and collaboratively with the district and the community to figure out — how can we get through the next couple of years of declining enrollment without having to rely upon layoffs?” Morganstern said in a Tuesday phone interview.
Matsuda and Morganstern’s statement explained that there will be meetings and discussions in the upcoming weeks to address the district’s decreasing enrollment.
“This means that everybody’s coming back and the teachers are still going to be at their schools,” Morganstern said. “The relationships that they built, the courses that they’ve taught, all the extracurriculars that they participated in, all of that’s going to remain.”
In March, district officials projected that enrollment will continue to decrease by another 1,350 students in the 2024-2025 school year, another 1,185 students in the 2025-2026 school year and another 935 students in the 2026-2027 school year.
[Read: Two OC School Districts Hit With Layoffs, Personnel Shakeups]
An online petition against the layoffs reached nearly 4,000 signatures by the time the board reversed its decision.
“We don’t want to see anybody [laid off], but we understand that if you’re losing students, some staff is going to necessarily have to go,” Morganstern said.
“We totally understand that. Two or three years from now, we could have 100 or 120 less teachers just because of enrollment. We can accept that, but how we get there I think is important.”
Angelina Hicks is a Voice of OC Tracy Wood Reporting Fellow. Contact her at ahicks@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @angelinahicks13.
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