“I’ve been with the district since July of 2019. This was the first year we’ve had to do layoffs,” Samantha Tobias-Espinosa the Assistant Superintendent of Berkeley Unified School District said. This 2024-25 school year, Tobias-Espinosa explained, BUSD cut $7.2 million from the district budget, resulting in staff cutbacks.
Of the positions reduced, the biggest reductions occurred in the cooking and gardening program, with multiple positions having hours cut, according to Tobias-Espinosa. Based on lower student enrollment numbers, multiple School Campus Aide positions, who supervise at lunch and recess, were reduced as well, Tobias-Espinosa added.
The smaller budget this year results from multiple factors, Tobias-Espinosa explained, such as certain grants not coming through and smaller student attendance numbers.
The California Education Code requires that school districts initially alert staff members on March 15 if there is a threat of their job being terminated or their hours cut back. This past March, BUSD sent out 83 initial notices to staff members around the district, according to Tobias-Espinosa. These notices can later be rescinded, and final notices are due by May 15 each year.
“When we got to the final notices, ... we were down to 31 final notices, and so we had rescinded all of those (other past notices),” Tobias-Espinosa said. For all of the other positions that had received notices, she added, funding was able to be found so their hours didn’t have to be reduced.
“We haven’t had this issue (of permanent positions being terminated), because the last four years or so (BUSD has) had money,” Frank Hernandez said. Hernandez is president of the Berkeley Council of Classified Employees (BCCE), a labor union which represents classified employees within BUSD, employees whose jobs don’t require teaching credentials.
Layoffs, or threat thereof, have not been the only effect of the reduced budget for this school year. Sifora Kahsay, a BHS student representative on the Berkeley Schools Excellence Program (BSEP) committee, explained that one impact of the smaller budget could be more programs requesting money from BSEP, which is a smaller BUSD revenue stream coming from a local tax.
“We were hoping that the school budget would grow this year so that (larger revenue streams) could fund more big stuff,” Kahsay said. “Reducing the budget will make bigger programs, like the (College Career Center), to still stay on BSEP. And my guess is it will definitely affect the smaller programs, because they’re not going to get (as much) money from BSEP, because BSEP has to fund those big projects in school and prioritize them.” While there is a possibility of smaller programs getting less funding, it was not able to be confirmed by Principal Juan Raygoza.
In the case that smaller programs aren’t able to receive adequate funding from BSEP, they can also elicit funding from other programs such as the Development Group. While budget cuts may be forcing certain funding streams to spread their resources along more programs, alternatives do exist that programs seeking funding can turn to.
For BUSD’s Office of Family Engagement and Equity (OFEE), five people were sent notices, according to OFEE Supervisor Lydia Gebrehiwot. The office itself has 12 total staff members working across multiple school sites.
“Many of the school staff who see the work OFEE does with families on a daily basis were vocal against the termination of OFEE positions and expressed the loss their schools and families would experience without OFEE. Many of them wrote letters to the Board or attended Board meetings to express their thoughts,” Gebrehiwot added. All notices to OFEE staff members were rescinded, though OFEE has had threats of layoffs in the past, according to Gebrehiwot.
Moving forward, Tobias-Espinosa explained she can’t discernibly say if layoffs will occur in the future, though if that is the case, it will be done “so that it impacts students the least, and that it is respectful and honors all of our employees and implements all of our strategies to make sure that we are doing what’s best for the students of Berkeley Unified.”