Job cuts at the Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District were approved, rejected and delayed last week as board members struggled to balance the needs of students with a multi-million dollar fiscal deficit.
The school board voted to eliminate its Language and Literacy Interventionist program Thursday night but modified the original proposal to retain four classroom teachers who had also been scheduled for layoffs. A separate item addressing the proposed layoff of 21 classified custodial staff members was continued to the board's March 3 regular meeting.
The board passed the amended resolution amid an outpouring of opposition from parents, teachers and students who argued the cuts would devastate reading support for the district's most vulnerable learners. The reductions, set to take effect in June 2026, are part of a broader effort to close an $11 million structural budget deficit.
Several board members initially spoke out against any job cuts but eventually voted to eliminate the LLI positions after the teachers were removed from the debate.
“I think that as we move forward thinking about this program review and what it means in the months to come, I don't want to make a mistake and I'm feeling very uneasy about this,” said board member Richard Tahvildaran-Jesswein.
The Language and Literacy Interventionists, known as LLIs, have provided supplemental pull-out reading instruction to fourth and fifth graders scoring in the lowest percentiles on state and district reading assessments. District officials argued the program has been rendered largely redundant by the recent adoption of a new phonics curriculum, updated English Language Development instruction and a broader shift toward delivering intervention support inside the general education classroom rather than in separate sessions.
Superintendent Antonio Shelton defended the restructuring as a product of rigorous program review and said the changes reflect an evolution in best practices for reading instruction.
"These evaluations are not about eliminating support," Shelton told the board. "They're about ensuring that the support we provide to students is effective, aligned and implemented with fidelity."
But critics pushed back hard. Educators and parents argued that classroom teachers cannot realistically absorb the specialized, intensive work performed by LLIs on top of their existing responsibilities. Opponents also took aim at a 2022 change in testing criteria that switched the district's universal screener from the FastBridge assessment to the STAR assessment, which shifted the eligibility threshold for LLI services from the 25th percentile to the 10th percentile — dramatically shrinking the number of students who qualify.
Teachers pointed to a stark disconnect between the eligibility data and actual student performance. At one elementary school, nearly half of all students failed to meet state ELA benchmarks, yet only three students currently qualify for tier three LLI support under the revised criteria.
Several board members expressed unease with both the timeline and the lack of a comprehensive plan to replace what the LLIs currently provide. Board member Jennifer Smith said she was troubled by the absence of a clear vision for how the district would serve students once the positions were gone, saying she felt the restructuring had been haphazard and that the LLIs' role had evolved without a coherent district-wide plan behind it. She added that she did not want the changes to result in students losing ground academically.
Board member Laurie Lieberman echoed those concerns, saying she could not support a decision of this magnitude without a fuller account of how the district's entire reading intervention program would function going forward.
"I just don't feel like we're ready," Lieberman said.
Board member Jon Kean acknowledged the community's fears but urged colleagues to trust the superintendent's programmatic review, noting the district had navigated a similar round of reading specialist restructuring three years earlier that ultimately preserved jobs.
"Taking action tonight does not foreclose anything," Kean said. "It's basically just saying we hear the superintendent, we hear our staff, that they believe this is a program that needs some adjustment."
Board member Stacy Rouse, cautioned against characterizing the changes as a retreat from reading instruction, arguing the district has quietly been building a more robust, classroom-embedded approach for several years.
"When you hear 'cutting reading,' that sounds horrible," Rouse said. "We're really looking at redundancies and programs and growth, and we have been moving toward this for a while."
The majority of the Board ultimately backed the LLI cuts with only Board President Alicia Mignano voting “no.”
LLI teachers whose positions are eliminated retain their status as permanent district employees and will be placed in classroom teaching assignments based on their credentials and seniority, displacing less senior teachers in those roles, according to Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Douglas Meza.