California teacher pink slips snag veterans
By Jill Tucker/San Francisco Chronicle
After five years of teaching, Quyen Tran thought maybe this year she wouldn't get a pink slip. She got the bad news from her principal at Emanuele Elementary School in Union City earlier this month. Days later, the layoff notice landed with a thud in her mailbox. It was one of at least 19,000 sent to California teachers by the state's March 15 deadline, including 60 in Tran's district. Those numbers are likely to increase as more districts report their layoff numbers later this week, according to teachers union officials. Many of the public school teachers on the layoff list are classroom veterans like Tran, who thought that by now in their career, they'd have job security. But over the past three years, 30,000 teachers have lost their jobs because of budget cuts, forcing district officials this year to drill deeper into their seniority lists. (more...)