San Bernardino cuts record 251 certificated employees

	SAN BERNARDINO - The school board voted after midnight Wednesday to eliminate a record 251 positions from next year's budget. The lion's share of those jobs are elementary school teachers, with the equivalent of 115 full-time K-6 teaching positions cut from the San Bernardino City Unified School District's 2012-13 budget. Board members voted to send preliminary layoff notices to certificated employees - an employee classification that consists of positions such as teachers and counselors - so they could make a legally required March 15 deadline, but they hope many of those positions will be restored if the budget outlook later improves. "This was not why I ran for this position, and we're not taking pleasure, any one of us, in what we're doing," board member Bobbie Perong said. "I'm just hoping for a better time when we can say we're adding teachers, not taking them away." That depends on union negotiations, among other things, but districts are often able to bring back many employees who are initially told their job will be cut. The board sent layoff notices to 210 teachers this time last year - a record at the time - and brought back 88 by June. Wednesday's cut stemmed from a proposal approved two weeks ago that entailed eliminating 136 certificated positions along with 103 other jobs as part of an effort to cut nearly $22 million from the budget. But those 136 jobs ballooned to 251 because of changing projections since the last board meeting, including smaller- than-expected enrollment. "I was not expecting a number this large," board President Barbara Flores told Harold J. Vollkommer, who prepared the recommendation. "When I was reading this, I was calling you names." Vollkommer, the assistant superintendent of human resources, said he expected the number to decrease significantly by mid-April as employees accept early retirement packages and to further decline later. But he added himself to the list of people unhappy with the decision. "When I have to do this work, I call myself names," he said. Some of the eliminated positions are currently unfilled. Rebecca Harper, president of the San Bernardino Teachers Association, said she didn't have a concrete proposal to save money another way, but said layoffs would hurt students. "SBTA stands firmly against any layoffs," she said. "We would not want to see any of them happen." By San Bernardino County Sun