Pasadena, CA -- (SBWIRE) --06/07/2011 -- School teachers in the Los Angeles United School District avoided the possibility of mass layoffs by agreeing to a salary cut.

The salary reduction will go in effect this new school year and is for one year only. The vote by the United Teachers Los Angeles, the teachers union, took place last Thursday and Friday. There were 20,429 union members who voted in favor of the agreement and 4,127 who voted against it, which meant the vote won easily by 83.2%. There were around 40,000 union members eligible to vote.

The Board of Education will meet on June 14 and is widely expected to approve the deal. The pact says that the school district will give out four unpaid day offs. The number could change depending on the state budget but with the budget projections are a likely scenario. The unpaid leaves, called furloughs, have already been implemented in the past two academic years and have resulted in a fewer school time for the students.

The salary cuts will save around 5,000 jobs. This means that around 1,700 elementary and secondary teaching positions will be saved, in addition to the 1,680 librarians, art teachers, and counselors. The class sizes will also increase from 20-1 to 24-1 in classes from kindergarten to third grade.
But union officials are saying that there can still be hundreds of job losses. Most of these will be the result of declining enrollment of students and the district turning over some schools to independently-run charter schools. Charters schools are not obliged to use district employees.

EducationCrossing, a job aggregator site focusing only on jobs in the education sector, has been able to find almost 10,000 teacher jobs across the country.