By Patric Hedlund
Frazier Mountain High School Head Coach Jarudd Prosser was given a layoff letter by El Tejon Unified School District on March 15.
Union contracts say seniority, not performance, dictate which teachers are given the notices first. Taft High School immediately made an employment offer. Though his father coached at FMHS before him, and his brother’s name is on the Frazier Mountain Park Veteran’s Memorial, Prosser felt compelled to accept the offer.
“I kept El Tejon Unified informed of the Taft situation every step of the way,” Prosser said in an email on Tuesday, May 4. “El Tejon wouldn’t commit to me, and as a result I felt I needed to take a sure job, even if it isn’t necessarily my first choice for a job come July….”
Acting El Tejon Unified School District Superintendent Danny Whetton was asked how this was allowed to happen.
“The California Ed code says that if it looks like it is possible that we are going to have to release teachers from positions, we must let them know by March 15,” Whetton explained.
“We got bad economic indicators from the state in January that led us to make an estimate of how many positions we might have to cut.” The ETUSD board authorized cutting 10.5 positions, “so we sent out those letters,” Whetton said.
Prosser is still upset: “The really irritating part to me is that two weeks after I committed to Taft, El Tejon Unified offered me my job back.”
Whetton says, “by April we got slightly better numbers from the state. Meanwhile, we also extended incentives for the higher paid older teachers who had been here a long time to see if any were interested in taking a retirement package. So we were also waiting for retirement decisions by some teachers.”
By the third week in April, “four teachers finally did send us letters accepting the retirement package. P.E. was top of the list to rehire; it was the last position we put on the cut list, and the first one we put back on—but by the time we could make the offer, he’d already taken the offer from Taft,” Whetton said.
“I told them I had already committed myself and I wouldn’t go back on my word,” Prosser explained.
Whetton says he understands: “He has to do what is necessary for his family. I just wish we didn’t have to send out those [layoff] letters until May 15, when we would have surer numbers.”
Still, Prosser says he is deeply disturbed by the process: “This is a very hard situation for me, I bleed blue and silver.”
This is part of the May 07, 2010 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.
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