John Williams, a physical education teacher and leadership instructor at Roy Romer Middle School, signs yearbooks for his students during his final day of work. Teachers who have been laid off pack up their offices and classrooms on the final school day of the year at Roy Romer Middle School in North Hollywood on Friday, June 24, 2011. ( Maya Sugarman/Staff Photographer)
If a picture is worth a thousand words, could an intricate video starring hundreds of students and their teachers be worth enough to save a dozen educators?
That is what students and teachers at Roy Romer Middle School are hoping, after they orchestrated an elaborate eight-minute music video to illustrate their frustrations with the impact budget cuts have had at their North Hollywood campus.
Since the school's opening three years ago, Romer Middle has shed 15 teachers due to budget cuts and is expected to lose 12 more next year.
Dramatic and shot mostly in black and white, the video adopted the now popular "lip dub" genre which usually includes crowds of people lip-synching to a song that is then dubbed over the filmed footage.
Students said they hoped people would hear their message loud and clear. | Click here to see photo gallery.
"We're outraged and don't know how the district can sit idly by," said eighth-grade student Joseph Rivas.
"We want to let everyone know that this is happening to our school and that it's not right," added eighth-grader Angela Rivera.
This week some 1,900 Los Angeles Unified teachers, counselors, librarians and
nurses received final dismissal notices from the district, which faces a deficit of $408 million for the 2011-12 school year.Romer drama production teacher Bobby Arnold said this recurring scenario has devastated his campus, which opened in 2008.
"There's been a cloud over us since March 15," Arnold said, referring to the date that, by state law, teachers must receive initial layoff notices.
While most LAUSD employees, including all teachers, agreed to take furlough days to help close the district budget gap, declining enrollment is still forcing the lay-off of hundreds of teachers.
To make matters more complicated, even as positions are being returned to schools because of the concessions made by workers, schools cannot select to re-hire the staff they previously had at their schools, and instead are forced to choose people based on seniority.
"When we realized that, no matter what, we weren't getting our people back, our cloud quickly became a torrential downpour," Arnold said.
Arnold decided then that he wanted to speak out on this issue and, after consulting colleagues and students, the idea of doing a lipdub video was born.
Planning the production wasn't easy.
Lipdub videos usually include large groups of people, the footage should be shot in one take, and the camera should travel to various places.
This meant Arnold and his stage crew coordinator Mike Ritchie had to strategically place more than 300 kids and 60 teachers throughout the two-story campus, where they would lipsynch their lyrics at exactly the right time while the camera rolled without a pause.
"It's the hardest production I've ever done," Arnold said.
Posted late Thursday night, by Friday afternoon the video had already been viewed by more than 600 people and news media outlets also wrote about the video.
Laura Bart, who has taught sixth grade at Romer for five years, admitted she does not know what she'll do for work come July 1, when she'll be officially unemployed, but said her main reason for participating in the video was not to get her job back.
"At the end of the day I'm an adult, I'll figure things out, I'll come up with a plan," Bart said.
Laid-off teacher John Williams, who taught P.E. at Romer for the last five years, was excited to have a real-life moment to teach his students about civic engagement and the power of organizing.
"I want them to know that they should stand up and let their voices be heard," Williams said.
"They are the ones that are losing through all of this... at least this is therapeutic for them... it allows them to heal."
Source: http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_18349051?source=rss
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