In the Newport-Mesa area, protests took place outside of Costa Mesa High School, elementary schools on the Westside of Costa Mesa, and at UC Irvine, where more than 300 students demonstrated.
But the protests— in which throngs of participants wore blue to illustrate their feelings about the state cuts — likely will have little effect in reversing the hundreds of school district layoffs expected to be initiated today, when district workers are to be notified of their possible termination.
“The notices are going to go out. The district is getting ready to tell everybody,” Kimberly Claytor, president of the Newport-Mesa Federation of Teachers, said during the demonstration outside of Costa Mesa High and across the street at OCC.
Claytor was referring to the some 125 positions that are to be cut from the 32-school district to balance the 2010-11 budget.
“There’s nothing we can really do about it at this point,” she said of the roughly 80 elementary school teachers expected to lose their jobs due to the $12 million in state funding cuts this year. “But we can make a difference at the state level if we try.
“We’ve just got to call our legislators and express our disapproval. We have to keep after them. We have to change laws and policies in Sacramento. That’s where it has to begin. We can yell all we want here, but it’s over there, in Sacramento, where it has to be heard.”
To that end, a petition movement is under way statewide to repeal the two-thirds vote required on behalf of the state Legislature to approve school budgets and pass tax increases.
Supporters of the petition drive would like a simple majority vote for such measures to pass.
In the past, they’ve tried to whittle the vote down to 55%, but such movements became complicated to explain and the initiatives never saw the light of a ballot measure.
