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The Pleasanton Unified School District will be canceling a handful of layoff notices that were previously sent out as part of the district’s latest budget cuts, following the school board’s approval last week.
Some of the positions that will not be laid off include social workers, district parent liaisons, child welfare and attendance specialists, elementary library media assistants, and elementary reading intervention support specialists.
In addition to the five line items that the board approved to be rescinded, the trustees also gave staff the green light to send out rescissions of layoff notices — at staff’s discretion — to other employees over the next couple of months if PUSD manages to find and secure additional funding from ongoing labor negotiations or grants for those positions.
“The sooner that we can return people and get people out of this sense of panic and pain, I think the better,” Trustee Charlie Jones said during the April 16 board meeting. “And so I appreciate that we are beginning to move on rescinding people’s layoffs.”
Last week’s decision was the latest in a roughly year-and-a-half long process where the district worked with members of the community and staff to identify about $11.2 million of budget cuts and reductions for the upcoming 2026-27 fiscal year.
These cuts were necessary in order to help address the district’s ongoing fiscal challenges, including a structural deficit caused in part by things like declining enrollment, reduced state funding and other inflationary pressures, according to PUSD.
But because approximately $5.4 million of the $11.2 million of identified cuts needed to be negotiated with labor partners like the Association of Pleasanton Teachers and the California School Employees Association Chapter 155, the school board back in February decided to approve a contingency list in case those $5.4 million were not realized. The contingency list items were the positions that, in previous budget talks, trustees deemed the most impactful to students and staff and ones they did not want to see on the chopping block.
Following the board’s approval of the contingency list, the district began working on sending out preliminary layoff notices, as required by law, by March 15.
However, it was always the district’s goal to rescind, or cancel, some of these layoff notices if staff were able to find additional funding sources, which they did.
According to the April 16 staff presentation, four of the five items in the contingency list of cuts were able to be saved thanks to funding realized from negotiations with the CSEA, which represents classified employees, and other slight tweaks to the list. For example, the district parent liaison position was revised after previously having a higher full-time equivalent reduction.
Prior to the budget item, the board approved a memorandum of understanding between the district and the CSEA, which essentially reflected the budget reductions and helped realize the rescission of layoff notices.
As for the social worker positions, staff said the district was able to secure new Alameda County Office of Education grant funding.
Jones said he appreciated seeing that a lot of the positions being saved fall within the scope of the district’s Local Control and Accountability Plan, which focuses on improving student outcomes, because of previous concerns raised by the community. However, he also noted how difficult the overall process continues to be and how he would still like to see more positions taken off the list.
“This is still painful,” Jones said. “There’s still a lot to be done and we can go further and farther and I’d like to believe that we will make that happen.”
And while it has been difficult for the trustees to see this process play out and to see all of the other positions that are still on the chopping block, they all said they hope to see some additional money realized over the next few months. Negotiations with APT are still ongoing, which staff said could also lead to more rescissions of layoff notices.
“I just hope that we can really secure those alternative funding sources quickly so we can get the specialists back and bring back as many people as we possibly can,” Trustee Laurie Walker said.
As far as next steps, staff will continue to work on finding other sources of funding, including working with organizations like the Pleasanton Partnerships In Education Foundation, as they begin the process of rescinding layoff notices. Assistant superintendent of human resources Nimarta Grewal told the board that as additional funding comes in, they will continue to rescind other items listed in the contingency plan — the board previously numbered the list so that the positions higher on the list would be saved first.
Grewal also said that while PUSD has until May 15 to send out any final layoff notices, there are still ways to bring back employees if they can find the money to do so, it would just be a case where the district asks those employees if they would like to be rehired.
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