The 352 teachers employed by the Moorpark Unified School District are grateful for last week's sympathetic editorial on the involuntary termination of so many employees due to the state budget crisis.

The first two and last three paragraphs of your treatise keenly illustrated the devastating effects that layoffs will have on teachers, families, students, and the community as a whole. Unfortunately, the third and fourth paragraphs took an unscheduled turn into muddied waters. As any English teacher would remark, you strayed off topic.

Permanent employee status (tenure, the term you used, is technically incorrect) has its basis within the process for teacher evaluation, not layoffs. At its core is the principle of due process, an objective protocol for fairly measuring teacher effectiveness and improvement.

It is all too easy to march out tenure, a tired, old, red herring of an argument, during such a difficult time. In doing so, you have unfairly accused our most veteran teachers of suffering "from burnout" and providing "a mediocre education" to students. Furthermore, you assert "teachers are terminated based on their lack of time in the classroom." This statement is inaccurate.

When a reduction in force, or layoffs, are necessary, school districts must follow an exacting process that is laid out in the California Education Code (the laws and regulations that govern public education), not administrative evaluations as you have suggested.

I believe that principals are thankful that they are not left with the responsibility of deciding who stays and who goes. Ed Code specifies that layoffs begin with those teachers who possess the least seniority in terms of their hire date within each individual school district—in other words, those who have worked the fewest number of years for the district.

You have incorrectly assumed that these teachers don't have as much time in the classroom as others. In Moorpark, you will find not only new teachers in this group, but also experienced veterans who may have worked for many years in other districts, yet are relatively new to our local district. I can think of several teachers who possess more than a dozen years of experience as a teacher, but will not have a job next year due to their lack of years in the MUSD.

If you meant to say that a broad cross section of caring, dedicated teachers will be affected, we couldn't agree more. These are terrible losses, and there are few in this community who won't be affected in some way by this demoralizing turn of events.

Public schools are guaranteed 40 percent of the state budget, yet we took over 50 percent of the cuts with the latest budget deal. Including the reductions we began this school year with, the mid-year cuts we were forced to make—including a teacher furlough day— and the cuts for next year, MUSD will be short about $8 million. For a district our size, that is a devastating blow to our program.

This translates into the potential reduction of 106 teachers, counselors, school psychologists, and assistant principals for next year. That is about 25 percent of our current teaching force. It doesn't take a complex math lesson to figure out just what that means for students: larger class sizes across all grade levels, less individual attention for our most needy students, reduction or elimination of programs and services across all of our schools—the list goes on and on.

And let's not forget our educational support partners, the custodians, maintenance and clerical personnel, health techs, food service, instructional aides, librarians, transportation, information technology—they will also be affected by reductions.

What can you do? Stay informed, be part of the conversation, offer help at your child's site. Today is Pink Friday, so named in sad recognition of the more than 16,000 teachers who will be receiving layoff notices, or pink slips, statewide. We can stand up for schools by letting our legislators know that cuts hurt kids.