LOS ANGELES — Joy McCreary’s 12th-grade advanced literature class had just ended at Blair Middle and High School when a substitute teacher came to relieve her. McCreary was needed in the principal’s office. She sensed what was coming.

Pasadena Unified School District, roiled by years of declining enrollment and grappling with the exhaustion of pandemic-era federal funds, needed to slash $12 million from its budget — and the school board had just voted to send out preliminary layoff notices to dozen of teachers. McCreary, who is seven months pregnant, did a simple calculation: “The golden rule is last in, first out. The writing was on the wall. I can do the math, I can count the positions.”

McCreary, 28, began gathering her things. Students noticed. “They asked, ‘What’s going on?’ And I said, ‘I’m probably about to be laid off right now,’” she told The Times. “And they asked, ‘What are you talking about? ... This is crazy.’”

Then they pleaded with her, “You can’t leave us.”

Pasadena Unified isn’t alone: Nearly 2,000 teachers in about 40 California school districts have received preliminary layoff notices in recent weeks, according to the California Teachers Association Districts from Santa Ana to San Francisco are among those reckoning with worsening financial outlooks and potential cuts.

But none of those districts also dealt with the deadly Eaton fire.

The Pasadena Unified layoffs — which total about 150 jobs, nearly 120 of them certificated positions mostly held by teachers — couldn’t have come at a worse time. The district’s deep-seated financial woes — a $37 million budget deficit only partially addressed by the layoffs — must be reconciled with the profound damage of January’s fire crisis.

“This is not ideal; this is a horrible time to have to do this,” Supt. Elizabeth Blanco said. “But the alternatives are very grim as well. As leaders of the district, we have a responsibility to lead [it] to fiscal health.”

For years, Pasadena Unified has been besieged by financial issues brought on in part by dwindling enrollment. A district that was home to about 21,000 students in 2005 now has less than 14,000. The exodus, fomented by a lack of affordable housing in the area, an abundance of charter school options and a competitive private school market, has led to the closure of five district campuses since 2018.

The latest pink slips, which will be finalized in May, were a necessary step in an effort to avoid insolvency, Blanco said. The job cuts were approved by the Pasadena Unified Board of Education in a 6-1 vote at its Feb. 27 meeting.

The reductions were in the works before the Eaton fire, which destroyed the homes of roughly 90 Pasadena Unified teachers, according to United Teachers of Pasadena. At least a handful of those fire victims have also been targeted for layoffs, the union said.

“Nobody wants to lay off our valued colleagues,” said Saman Bravo-Karimi, Pasadena Unified’s chief business officer. “We wish it wasn’t necessary, especially under the circumstances.”

Over the course of more than four hours, teachers and parents at the February meeting pleaded with the board to find an alternative to the cuts, delivering one emphatic salvo after another. Elizabeth Gardner, a mother of two children at Altadena Arts Magnet School, told the board that laying off teachers at a school where many families had been uprooted by the fire was like “kicking a dog when they’re already down,” eliciting raucous applause.

Zeudi Bernardo, a teacher at Pasadena High School, wore a “Game of Thrones” T-shirt and warned the board that “making these cuts [is] like waking a sleeping dragon,” a reference to the mythical, fire-breathing creatures that were a major part of the television series.

“These cuts ... feel like they are personal,” she said.

Bernardo told The Times that she was among the teachers losing their jobs.

A battered district

In California, public school funding is largely determined by average daily attendance. So the loss of roughly 33% of its students over two decades has had a slow yet deepening effect on Pasadena Unified’s balance sheet.

The district got financial help during the COVID-19 emergency: about $62 million in federal pandemic relief funds. The money paid for efforts to expand Pasadena Unified’s health and wellness program, which grew to include more than 20 teachers, the district said, and allowed it to “ramp up” other services to aid in the recovery from the public health disaster. The funding also bolstered Pasadena Unified’s financial reserves, which allowed it to give teachers raises, the district added. But the money was fully spent by the end of the 2023-24 school year, Bravo-Karimi said.

Jonathan Gardner, the Pasadena teachers union president — and husband of Elizabeth Gardner — said the relief money was used by the district to justify an increase in spending on contracted services and “a whole lot of admin positions.” But, he said, when it came time for layoffs, there have been “minimal cuts” to those jobs.

Immediately after the Eaton fire, Bravo-Karimi reached out to the state’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which helps school districts navigate financial issues. “I said, ‘We are facing these substantial financial challenges ... the circumstances are so awful, what do we do?’” he said.

The team’s advice, Bravo-Karimi said, was to “proceed with any reduction we were going to make before the fire, which unfortunately includes layoffs. The rationale we were given: We need to demonstrate financial responsibility.”

Lingering over the issue is the prospect of Pasadena Unified ceding control to the state of California. Ahead of the school board meeting, Blanco warned that “if we do nothing and the district finances continue to deteriorate, the state is going to be required to step in and take over.”

She was referring to a series of actions that occur if a school district requests an emergency loan from the state to remain solvent. Upon being granted such funds, a district is placed into receivership and taken over by the state’s Department of Education. The district’s superintendent is removed, and its board loses decision-making power, among other steps.

“Our agency looks at the early warning signs of a district experiencing distress in their budget so that we can get them turned around so they do not wind up insolvent,” said Michael Fine, chief executive of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team.

For Pasadena Unified’s 2025-26 school year budget, $5 million of the cuts is coming from layoffs of classroom staff and about $7 million from layoffs at the district’s central office. That doesn’t fully eliminate the deficit — far from it — but Bravo-Karimi said the reductions “are the amount we thought we could prudently implement at this time.”

A former teacher, Blanco said the layoffs have been crushing: “We are isolated in our sorrow here.”

Months of misery

As spring nears, a bleak annual rite plays out at school districts across California: the delivering of reduction-in-force notices to teachers.

State law requires districts to inform teachers about possible staff reductions for the next school year. Sometimes, the notices are rescinded. That was the case for many recipients in Pasadena Unified last year, after most prospective layoffs were avoided.

But Fine said Pasadena Unified “can’t kick the can down the road anymore.”

And this year, the Eaton fire has cast a long shadow — especially for teachers who lost their homes.

Like Micah Alden.

When the fire tore through Altadena, Alden’s new house in the foothills burned. The Blair Middle and High School teacher and her husband had bought the property just a few weeks earlier, and it was to have been their quiet haven — a place where they could raise their infant son.

It got worse: The apartment that the English teacher and her family had been renting nearby was also destroyed. Alden, 32, has endured a wrenching kind of sorrow. And yet she still wanted to be at school, with her students.

“Even on the worst days of my life, I wanted to go to work,” said Alden, who joined the district in 2021 and worried she might lose her job amid the layoffs. “My students are my kids.”

When she wasn’t pulled out of her classroom for a meeting on March 3, Alden knew her job was safe. But she remains anguished, and thinks of McCreary, her friend and fellow Blair teacher.

For her part, McCreary is anxious about entering motherhood in flux. “I can’t be without health insurance,” she said. “I can’t be without a stable source of income.”

Several of McCreary’s students lost their homes in the Eaton fire. Many were displaced by the conflagration, which saddled some with traumas that could take years to heal. What they need now, she believes, is stability. “I’m a stable person in their lives who has invested a lot in them,” McCreary sasid.

But at least she still has her home.

Gardner, the union president, said about a dozen teachers whose homes burned are believed to have been given layoff notices, but the numbers are not yet confirmed.

Further uncertainty hangs over the district: It is not known how many fire-displaced families will return next school year. And fewer students means less funding.

Still, Fine sees reasons to be optimistic. “There is nothing I know about Pasadena’s board or leadership to cause me to question that they are well-informed to make the right decisions,” he said. “I can’t say that about every district.”

For McCreary, though, this is a period of worry. For herself and her students. And she’s been thinking of the afternoon when she was summoned from her classroom.

“Obviously, selfishly, I want a job, but ... you go into teaching because you love kids and because you want to serve public education,” she said. “That was the hardest part of the day for me — seeing them upset.”

The layoffs take effect June 30.

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