"School Workers Can Lose Jobs But Keep Salaries" by Emily Alpert, Voice of San Diego 2/9/2011
Excerpt
Under an unusual set of rules, some San Diego Unified School District workers who lose their jobs and settle into lower positions will continue to earn their same pay for a year or more.
The longstanding rules are meant to insulate school workers from sudden changes in pay. But they will also chip away at the immediate savings if San Diego Unified tries to thin its workforce this year. Hundreds of jobs could be slashed as schools prepare for an estimated $120 million in cuts.
Here is how it works: Someone who climbed the San Diego Unified ladder from one job to the next can bump back into the kind of job they held before if their job is eliminated, displacing someone else. That person can bump someone else with less seniority. And so on. People bump each other like dominoes. The last domino that falls is the person who has nowhere to go — and they ultimately get laid off.
Bumping happens only to classified workers, those who don't teach or hold a credential like counselors or nurses. They range from cooks and custodians to budget analysts and construction managers. The phenomenon occurs in school districts all over California. But in San Diego Unified, a rare rule says that when a clerk or computer technician bumps to a lower job, they don't get a lower paycheck right away.
The school district typically keeps paying them their old, higher wages for a year and a half. The only immediate savings it gets are from the last domino, the lowest employee who actually leaves.
Similar rules ease the budget pain for the top managers, supervisors and school administrators in San Diego Unified. If they lose their jobs to budget cuts but are reassigned to lower spots in the district as administrators, they still keep their higher wages for a year.
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