‘We have to keep after them’

Hundreds of educators, parents and students across Orange County took aim at the state Thursday, protesting deep cuts in California’s education budget.

Reductions have led to anticipated layoffs at Newport Mesa Unified and many other districts, fewer classes at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa and fee hikes at UC Irvine.

Carrying signs and standing on various corners in front of schools throughout the county, some chanted their disapproval at Sacramento while passing motorists beeped in approval at the sea of demonstrators.

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.

The two-thirds requirement, in existence since 1978, is a contentious issue among many who feel that Sacramento is nothing but a miniature version of the nation’s capital, where gridlock is commonplace and nothing ever really gets done, Claytor said.

Nowhere is this political stalemate more obvious than when it comes to passing the state budget, which local school districts are constantly waiting on, sometimes as late as the middle of the summer, said Frank Oppedisano, executive director of the Newport-Mesa Federation of Teachers.

“School districts have to manage their own budgets, and when we’re sitting around waiting for the state budget, and it gets to be the middle of the summer, well, I don’t have to tell you how confusing and harmful it can be to us,” Oppedisano said. “It would be nice if the state could get us the information earlier. That way, we could plan accordingly on how much we were going to lose instead of trying to guess. It would give us a much better idea on how we’re going to fund our programs.”

In the demonstration at UCI, more than 300 UCI students joined University of California systemwide protests.

At UCI, they marched through the campus, and students walked out of classrooms in droves.

Part of the crowd’s plan was to occupy a university building, but police, dressed in riot gear, closed off expected targets, including the administration building for more than three hours.