Last week a
superior court judge in Los Angeles ruled to stop seniority based layoffs at three schools in LA Unified that were decimated by last year’s layoffs. We highlighted one of the schools, Markham Middle School, in a
recent report on restructuring the federal school improvement process (See past post for detail on
Markham). This school recently underwent a “School Turnaround” – one of the four models the federal government is supporting with its $3 billion investment in School Improvement Grants. Under this model, the school hires a new principal, and then lets all of the teachers at the school go, and then the teachers reapply for their jobs. Some are rehired, and some are not. As a result of this process, the Markham Middle school staff consisted of largely young energetic teachers. Unfortunately, this was a group of young energetic teachers without much seniority in the district. So, when LA Unified started to give out layoff notices last spring most of the Markham staff were given notice, and in the end around 2/3rds of their staff were laid off. Needless to say the school has not done very well since then and still has not been able to fill those
