Laura Barragan has known her son Nathan’s preschool teacher, Athena Gonzalez, for six years. That’s because Gonzalez also taught Barragan’s 5-year old daughter, Joanna, and her 9-year-old son, Angel.
Barragan has a lot of uncertainty in her life. She doesn’t know whether her husband will keep his job as the recession continues to roll on. Life keeps getting more expensive, and ends get harder and harder to meet. But the teachers at Fay Elementary School in City Heights have been one constant.
“My son has been here since pre-K,” Barragan said. “His teacher, we see her every day, we say hello. I don’t know what we’re going to do next year.”
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This might be the last year Barragan gets to chat with Gonzalez every morning. And it might be the last year her son, who is due to spend another year of preschool in Gonzalez’s class, gets to benefit from her teaching.
Gonzalez, like 26 other teachers at Fay, is currently laid off. Of the 29 classroom teachers at the school, only two will certainly keep their jobs next year.
There are plenty of broad verbs and adjectives to describe what will happen at Fay if those layoffs go ahead. The school will be decimated, gutted, blown up. But look closely in the corners of the big picture and there’s a different narrative: The school will also be affected in countless smaller ways that are less easy to quantify.
Training programs, personal relationships and teacher camaraderie will all be disrupted by layoffs.
To understand those impacts, I spent a couple of hours at Fay on Wednesday, talking to the principal, teachers, a parent and students. The visit was part of a three-day exercise to observe the impact of the district’s layoff crisis at the grassroots level.
This much was clear from my interviews: The threads that form the fabric of a school can be torn apart when teachers are laid off and replaced with educators from elsewhere in the district.