'When the house is already burning': CCUSD to reconsider counselor cuts

While the Culver City Unified School District (CCUSD) Board of Education voted to move forward with position cuts to certificated employees at a Special Meeting this past Tuesday, March 3, a resolution to send layoff notices to classified employees was tabled due to significant changes under consideration.

This motion will be reconsidered at the Board’s next regularly scheduled board meeting on Tuesday, March 10, with the initial list of position eliminations being considered alongside alternatives that would maintain three mental health counselor positions originally slated for removal in the original resolution.

A Board resolution is required for layoff notices to be issued, and the Board of Education passed a resolution to issue notices to certificated employees Tuesday night. This will lead to 15 position eliminations if finalized May 15, which include four Elementary School Teachers, three Math teachers, and two Language Arts teachers.

The proposed elimination of three counselor positions as part of the classified employee resolution would cut the District's counselor workforce in half. Board members were hesitant to make such cuts to mental health support services, particularly after student representatives at the meeting spoke of personal experiences with overworked faculty and staff.

However, the District will have to find positions that make up a comparable expenditure to the $549,000 ($183,000 per position) saved by eliminating these counselor positions to ensure the Second Interim Report on the District’s budget is approved by the state. This report is due March 15, which is also the deadline for issuing layoff notices to District staff.

While layoffs can be rescinded after this deadline before May 15, no new layoffs can be proposed for the 2026-27 school year after March 15.

Mental Health a Must

Lauren Jagnow, who became the President of the CCUSD Association of Classified Employees following the retirement of Debbie Hamme last December, spoke of the potentially reverberating impact the counselor cuts could have for both students and employees in the district.

“They will become firefighters called when the house is already burning down,” Jagnow said of the three remaining counselors.

Culver City Federation of Teachers President Ray Long spoke on behalf of the certificated employees. He argued that these cuts were misguided because they were focused on student-facing positions. Long emphasized a sore point amongst many critics of these cuts: not a single management position was being considered Tuesday night.

"These are tough times," Long said, "but you have to prioritize in a time of crisis and you have to look at what's furthest from the classroom."

Concerned voices from teachers and the community echoed Long’s words, with class-size increases resulting from teacher layoffs also a significant concern for both parties. The two student representatives, Jordan Kang and Alexis Prieto, gave resounding preferential no votes, with the former recalling personal experience with a teacher who was overworked after another had left the District.

“This amount of work is what leads teachers to burn out, lose their passion, and struggle to connect with their students,” Kang said.

Prieto took particular exception to the proposed cuts to mental health counseling, arguing that they are a crucial piece of the school ecosystem and serve as a safe space for students, particularly for those “in the most turbulent times of their lives.” She argued the cuts would significantly harm those efforts.

“I would even venture to say that students need more counselors because we are not all properly helped,” Prieto said.

Financial circumstances have created a need to decrease at CCUSD, and the district does not have much time to sort out the specifics. Initial layoff notices must be given to teachers by March 15, just days after the meeting at which the resolution will be finalized.

However, these notices are only preliminary and serve to inform employees that their positions are under consideration for termination. The final decision to solidify these layoffs must be made by May 15, giving the district several months to assess its finances and seek other revenue sources before confirming the cuts.

Board of Education members were not eager to make these moves, but mostly echoed a similar sentiment on their positions. While the decision is regrettable, the Board is running out of options to avoid the consequences of failing to convince the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) that the District has a sufficient plan to maintain its reserves at a mandatory 3% of its expenditures.

“There's really no other choice,” Board Member Lindsay Carlson said of the cuts. “We're having to cut valuable things that people care about until we can fix the revenue side of the equation.”

“We are at the point where there is not much left to cut,” Board Vice President Brian Guerrero said. “This year, they have arrived at the classroom.”

The only member to vote against the certificated cuts, Triston Ezidore, cited insufficient planning for how the services these positions provide would be absorbed by retained staff as his reason for dissent.

He reiterated the concerns of Long and many residents who spoke out against cutting student-facing positions, noting that no District-level or management employees were being targeted for layoffs in these resolutions. While the Director of Security position eliminated is considered a District-level position, it is a vacant role set to disappear due to attrition, whether or not this decision was made.

“When I look at this list,” Ezidore said, “it's clear to me that everything was not on the table, and we were very clear-eyed about what we were willing to put on the table and what we weren't.”

Controversy over the Arts

While the Community Budget Advisory Committee (CBAC) did recommend consideration of counseling reductions to reach the $3.5 million in cuts necessary for budget approval, it also outlined several management-level positions that the committee recommends be “reviewed for efficiency and redundancy.” However, Carlson pointed out that cuts have been coming from the District Office in recent years, and there was not much room left to cut there.

Drawing on the recommendation presented to the Board at the last meeting on February 24, Carlson proposed an amendment to replace one of the three mental health counselors slated for cuts with a management position: the District Arts Coordinator, a job held by Heather Moses.

“I want to be clear that this is not a hostility towards the arts,” Carlson said. “I think we need to take a look at who is bearing the brunt of these costs.”

In their presentation to the Board on February 24, the CBAC recommended considering three roles in the District for evaluation: the District Arts Coordinator position that Carlson proposed be included in cuts Tuesday night, Visual Arts/Performing Arts (VAPA) Management Support, and General Manager of the Robert Frost Auditorium.

This CBAC recommendation, alongside a February 3 Community Budget workshop that included a presentation classifying VAPA Management Support and 7th Period as “above and beyond” core programs and supplemental program enhancements, sparked panic about the status of Arts programs in the District.

Supporters of the Academy of Visual and Performing Arts (AVPA) at the Culver City High School distributed flyers around the city in the days leading up to the meeting, which claimed that the AVPA program was at risk of being eliminated entirely, leading to Superintendent Alfonso Jiménez sending a letter last Friday indicating that AVPA cuts were not on the resolutions on Tuesday night.

Public perception concerns were among those shared by Board Members apprehensive about moving forward with Carlson’s proposal. Board President Stephanie Loredo was concerned that moving forward with such a cut without adequate notice would erode public trust in the Board, particularly given the community's current sensitivity to the status of Arts programs.

“This is a significant change,” Loredo said of Carlson’s amendment. “If certain folks in the public had known that was on the agenda for tonight, we would have had a fairly different public comment.”

Guerrero argued that the job duties Moses has taken on as the District Arts Coordinator have evolved beyond the job description, and suggested that the Board evaluate the scope of the position before making significant decisions about it.

“I think it is involved in too many things, whether it's grant or supporting elementary or supporting the high school and the middle school,” Guerrero said. “To remove that position without carefully mapping out all the different aspects of it...I don't think that's something that we can succeed at between now and March 15.”

He was also eager to keep the mental health counselors employed, but noted that some of the potential consequences of an insufficient management staff can be seen in CCUSD’s recent past. He recalls the systemic inefficiencies plaguing the district when he first joined the board in 2022.

“We had issues with folks not getting paid on time, and that still happens occasionally,” Guerrero recalled. “It was taking months and months to hire a single aide.”

Lachman was supportive of considering Arts reorganization in the District, but he shared similar concerns to Guerrero that it is a matter that must be approached with great care and methodical planning. He argued that in the past, similar rash decisions about positions have led to unforeseen consequences.

While Lachman was not opposed to eliminating the position if deemed appropriate after proper analysis, he wanted to know the specifics of the position's role in the District’s operations before making a decision.

“What is the impact in terms of how we're finding, how we're getting, and administering grants? How are we administering the department as a whole?” Lachman wondered on Tuesday. “I just don't feel comfortable with the information I have now and making that decision without having that information.”

There were concerns that some programs were being elevated above others. Ezidore acknowledged the large amount of correspondence he has received about the arts program; he wanted to ensure that each essential service the District provides to student life was being weighed equally in these discussions.

“What about the lives that were saved by our school psychologists, and what about the lives saved by mental health counselors?” he recalled asking himself. “How can we say that one department is more important than the other?”

The first vote Tuesday night was to maintain the initial layoff notification for certificated employees, which passed 4-1, with Ezidore dissenting.

After deliberating on how to proceed with the classified employee cuts with Board Members hesitant to act on counselor positions, a decision was made to direct District staff to present options that replace the three mental health counselors with different positions to be considered at the March 10 Board Meeting.

An Immediate Response

Following the decisions made on Tuesday, CCFT issued a statement to Culver Crescent regarding the certificated employee reductions.

It reads as follows:

The Culver City Federation of Teachers was disappointed in tonight’s 4-1 vote on a layoff resolution that will send initial reduction in workforce notices to some of our teachers and a nurse. While we understand CCUSD is facing a budget deficit largely created by poor decisions by previous boards of education and administrations, as educators, we always believe cuts must come furthest away from the students. We thank Board Member Ezidore for voting down the resolution. We also thank Board Member Carlson for suggesting an amendment to add a management position recommended by the Community Budget Advisory Committee (CBAC). We hope now that the Board has tasked the district to find other cuts, the District will look to management cuts. We thank our members and community supporters who spoke, showed up, and wrote in.

A day of action originally slated as a larger event focused on demonstrating that all students are welcome and safe at Culver City schools evolved into a demonstration also focused on raising awareness about the decision made Tuesday night.

Chants like “Cuts hurt kids” rang out as informed education advocates worked to spread the word about the previous night’s decision and the impending move next Tuesday to the more than 100 people participating in the action in front of Culver City Middle School.

That night, the CBAC held its monthly meeting, where the withholding of more than $7 million in funds to CCUSD was a key talking point.

Proposition 98 dictates the amount of funding that school districts and other local education authorities (LEAs) receive from the state, but the state has withheld funding over the past two years to protect its reserve fund. While rightsizing the District would eventually be a necessary undertaking, Rajiv said at the CBAC meeting that having that Prop 98 funding would allow the District to approach the task with more care and tact.

Many education advocates argue the move to withhold these funds is illegal, and members of the CBAC considered how best to communicate to local representatives that no budget should be passed without LEAs receiving the money they are entitled to under Prop 98.

Their deliberations on this topic naturally pivoted to the budget and the previous night’s decision, and the CBAC also brainstormed a new list of potential recommendations for Rajiv beyond their initial guidance. The list of recommendations compiled by Rajiv includes:

• Evaluate the need to maintain a Summer School Principal position.
• Consider changes in work days over cuts to entire positions.
• Think about the possibility of dropping a High School AP Class.
• Look into modifying Administrator and Faculty roles (i.e., implement a Dean of Students)
• Develop a strategy to generate revenue from the Robert Frost Auditorium.
• Explore a potential Joint-Use Agreement with the City of Culver City.
• Compile data on the financial impact of relationships between CCUSD and entities like AVPA.