Three San Leandro High School students are continuing a hunger strike they announced Tuesday night to protest the School Board's unanimous decision that could eliminate music, sports and other programs.
"I am nervous, but willing to keep going until the board notices how much money they really hold," said San Leandro High senior Kayla Ely, one of the hunger strikers and a Patch blogger.
The two other hunger strikers are Veronica Mandujano and Anai Rosales, also seniors at San Leandro High and, like Ely, members of the school's Social Justice Academy, according to a Hayward Daily Review article.
Before Tuesday's board meeting, Ely had urging the district to dip into its reserves rather than issue layoff notices to an additional 53 school employees whose departures could shut down all athletic activities, enrichment programs like music, library assistance, counseling and other services.
The size of the school district's reserve is a central issue.
The San Leandro Teacher's Association argues that the district has a 14.5 percent reserve.
School Board President Morgan Mack-Rose said only three percent of that is discretionary, with the other 11 percent is already earmarked for near-term school expenses like textbook purchases.
Issuing the layoff notices is also a tactic by the board to get teachers to continue a set of concessions that could lessen or eliminate the need for the cuts -- but at the expense of maintaining what amounts to pay cuts for instructors who have not had a raise in years.
Another factor that could lessen the need for layoffs is what Sacramento does. In May the Governor is supposed to issue a revised budget projection, and if revenues increase, there would be less need for cuts.
So the three pieces in the board's budget puzzle are: how much to extract from reserves, how much to seek in teacher concessions and how much to expect from the state.
Amidst this the hunger-striking students have upped the emotional ante. As Mandujano told the board Tuesday night, she hoped the fast would show that "like our schools, my body can’t survive with just the bare minimum."
Last October, Mandujano, Ely and other Social Justice Academy members led one of the earliest Bay Area protests to .
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1. Increased fuel prices hit schools hard, and 2. The oil companies will profit handsomely
On this fascinating string I'll let the Ambiguously Real Duo asphyxiate reason and common sense. Carry on!
Apple's net profits? almost 26%. Microsoft? 33% Heck, even Ford has a 15% profit margin. Oil is not a very profitable business.
Only problem with your numbers on oil company profits is the fact that with modern day accounting principals no one knows what the real profit percentage number is
Part of the problem with all of these discussions is that people around the Bay Area are really, really, really convinced of a whole slew of utterly wrong beliefs. Such as "Big Oil" being amazingly profitable, cops/teachers/firemen/paper-pushing bureaucrats being "middle class," or that there's some shortage of tax revenues (see my post on the state budget, where Jerry is proposing a $3 BILLION/50% increase in "general government" spending AND a 10+% increase/$1+B increase in prison spending - when the prison population is dropping 30%, but somehow can't find $2B for schools)....
Virtually unmoderated forums with locals in lycra pontificators = confirmation bias on steroids.
As big and successful as they are, making record profits even in a recession (http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/27/news/companies/exxon_mobil/index.htm), oil companies' most significant role may be as a driving force of our environmental and foreign policies. Unfortunately what may be "rational economic behavior" for a multi-national corporation isn't always in the best interests of "non-corporate persons." You know, the old-fashioned kind made of flesh and bone who pay taxes at the higher personal rate.