Right now, state and local governments are trying to figure out how to safely reopen schools with plenty of social distance … and, in some areas, a lot less teachers. Cities and towns are responding to budget shortfalls by laying off teachers and paraprofessionals. One teacher’s story shows just how much of a mess this is.
Graciela Mohamedi is a physics teacher in Brookline, Massachusetts. She’s a former Marine with a PhD in applied physics from Oxford University, a lecturer at Boston University, and an activist who’s been involved with the March for Our Lives Boston and a range of other local organizing on racial justice and more. When budget woes hit Brookline, she was laid off, then un-laid off, then laid off, then brought back, but only part-time. She and her union have brought a grievance to try to restore her to full hours, but that will take time. And, Mohamedi said in a phone call, “The scary thing is that they didn’t botch me as badly as they botched some other people.”
Brookline’s school leadership is a mess, The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss reports. There have been three superintendents—two of them interim—in two years, with a fourth coming up. And Mohamedi has been a victim of that mess, among other messes, getting a layoff notice on May 30, a notice she wasn’t being laid off on June 12, and just hours later an email saying whoops, “I am writing today with some not so good news. It appears that you were sent a recall from reduction in force letter prematurely.” On June 16, Mohamedi was told she could have her job back—or, 80% of it, anyway.
Mohamedi suggested to Strauss that while “incompetence” was the main factor here, the school system was also not working to retain teachers of color. Two white physics teachers were brought back at full hours, while she, a Latina, was not. The school district cites seniority, but Mohamedi said that even a seniority-driven process could have worked to retain educators of color. “But they actively didn’t.”
Mohamedi explained to Daily Kos that teachers get professional status, the Massachusetts equivalent of tenure, when they start their fourth year as teachers in a district. But for teachers who are pre-professional status, seniority doesn’t weigh in. Brookline laid off pre-professional status teachers, and then appears to have made no effort to prioritize bringing back the educators of color among them. Mohamedi had been the second hired of the three physics teachers laid off, but she was the last brought back, and only at reduced time. Of those other teachers, Mohamedi said “They are white. They are fantastic educators and I don’t hold anything against them”—this decision was made by the administration. But, Mohamedi said, she is the only underrepresented minority in the science program at Brookline High School. That matters.
Not only that, “I was recruited.” Mohamedi and many of the district’s other educators of color were hired as part of a diversity hiring initiative that, she explained, started four years ago but got fully in gear three years ago—only to leave the teachers hired under the initiative vulnerable to layoffs since they hadn’t yet gotten professional status.
As a union activist, “It’s really been horrible because people who didn’t understand how seniority works and how education works have been wanting to stand up for the educators of color, but they’re saying the union is the problem,” Mohamedi said. That’s not it. Instead, “We need additional protections we don’t have. Seniority is probably one of the only reasons we have any educators of color in our schools.”
In an email, her local union’s president, Jessica Wender-Shubow, both assailed the number of layoffs and the racial disparities involved. “There was never a need for the extreme measures taken, starting with laying off six times the number of educators needed to balance the budget at that time,” she wrote. But “Even if [the administration] needed to make cuts, which we oppose, it is reprehensible that they implied that seniority or other hard won rights and benefits were the reason that educators of color were disproportionately harmed by this administration's conduct.”
”Every single racial justice proposal the union has brought to the bargaining table has been rejected outright, even those that cost not one penny,” she added. As for the layoffs, 28% of those who haven’t been fully recalled to their jobs are educators of color, while 16% of their union bargaining unit are educators of color. Not only that, but 14 out of 18 paraprofessionals who were not renewed because of performance were people of color or ethnic minority, something Wender-Shubow called “shocking evidence of racism” because “These paras should have been provided with more supports and supervision to ensure that they were successful.”
This week, the Brookline Educators Union brought more than 8,500 petition signatures to the town hall calling for the reinstatement of all the laid off teachers and paraprofessionals.
While Brookline and its botched layoffs may be a special case, get ready to see teacher layoffs and other big education and social service cuts in your area. The coronavirus pandemic is hitting state and local budgets hard, risking millions of job losses if the federal government doesn’t help. That means layoffs of teachers and school staff—among other necessary workers—could become commonplace. And this is happening as local governments refuse to cut police budgets, literally choosing police over teachers. Be ready to fight that, starting now, if not yesterday, and if layoffs do come to your area, keep a close eye on whether people of color are being disproportionately affected.
And to understand what’s at stake, see for yourself what kind of a kick-ass educator and activist Graciela Mohamedi is by watching her video statement when she ran for her union’s executive committee: