Jun 24, 2009 7:49 pm US/Eastern
I-Team: Teachers Not Giving Up Fight After Layoffs
FORT LAUDERDALE (CBS4 I-TEAM) ―
Gretchen Marfisi is an award winning and beloved art teacher who is now out of a job.
"There are just not jobs out there, so it makes me scared that I am thrown back out there when I thought I was a career lady, safe and sound in the classroom doing my job," an emotionally charged Marfisi told
Chief I-Team investigator Michele Gillen on the heels of hundreds of pink slips being sent out to Broward County teachers.
"Nobody knew this last step was coming with the layoffs," the renowned teacher and current director of the Art Department at the new West Broward High School explained. The unemployment nightmare hit home in a multitude of ways: Marfisi spent more than a quarter century teaching in Miami-Dade County Schools before embarking on pioneering the program at West Broward High.
"When they start firing teachers, all those things society thinks is safe seems not to be safe anymore, it starts turning your world upside down," Marfisi added, as she joined nearly 400 other shell-shocked Broward County teachers who have been laid off. The cuts were determined by lack of seniority and certification.
"It's a very sad day. Our hearts are very heavy, very weighted, we have shed tears here," Dane Ramson, Chief Negotiator for the Broward Teachers Union told Gillen.
At union headquarters leaders are not giving up their fight, but the weight of having so many teachers cut was resonating across the board Wednesday night. Some teachers are still not aware because they are on vacation—that the letter cutting them loose, awaits them.
"Isn't that sad? That's the way I tell you, you are unemployed? I go to the mailbox and get a certified letter?'' decried Ramson. "I do not feel this was the only option at this juncture. The cost of the loss of a primary income...the cost of a loss of an excellent teacher it's immeasurable."
Union leaders say they are not convinced teacher cuts were the only option to dwindling school enrollment and a reported budget crisis. In Miami-Dade hundreds of teachers have been laid off or reassigned over the past year.
Paying the ultimate cost are the students. The football stars of Plantation High School, which just lost three teachers, say each instructor represents a world of difference in their world, often even paying for their school supplies.
According to Jermone Howard, linebacker for the team, "I just feel that now is a great portion of my life and my education has been taken away from me."
"Does it make you scared?" Gillen asked. "Not scared, but worried," he shared.
Meanwhile, Marfisi says she worries about all the kids, including her own two who are in college, and the faces and dreams of the children she already misses in the classroom.
"You just wish something else could have happened", she muses with a hurting heart, who wants her students not to be troubled, but to remain optimistic. "We love you we care about you and you will make it. Keep going."
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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