Pasadena, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 05/03/2011 -- Hundreds of teachers from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) are now filing for the layoff hearings to get a chance to speak up for their jobs.

The layoff notices were issued on March 15 and the school district has been the center of media attention because of protests from parents, students, and teachers. The hearings have already started on Monday and will continue into May. Teachers who have requested to be present during the hearings can then question their layoffs. This move by the teachers is been seen as a last-ditch attempt at saving their jobs after weeks of protests and largely sympathetic media coverage didn’t seem to make their prospects any better.

The LAUSD administrators say that the school district, America’s second-largest in terms of student enrollment, has a deficit of $408 million. This is what caused them to send layoff notices to around 5,000 teachers and other support staff. But the layoff notices are not final because the state funding for the school district has not been finalized. Administrators are insisting that the notices only present a worst-case scenario. All the layoffs will be finalized only on June 30.

Marla Eby, spokeswoman for United Teachers Los Angeles, said that most of the teachers who got the layoff notices were arts, music, drama teachers, and teachers in magnet programs. The district claims that it wants to keep all the teachers in the classroom. But if the layoffs do occur, it will result in bigger classes in a district where many classes are already at full capacity.

EducationCrossing, a job aggregator site focusing only on jobs in the education sector, has been able to find almost 8,500 teaching jobs across the country. These teaching jobs are not just in math, science, and the language arts but also in art, drama, and ESL.