It started on Tuesday and ended on Wednesday.

In a meeting for the ages, there were tears, laughter, anger, joy, music, applause, poetry, and even some late-night pizza. And a political star may have been born.

After nearly eight hours, amid yawns, fumbled speeches and an air of fatigue in the room, the Santa Barbara Unified School District Board of Education voted to send preliminary layoff notices to 85 teachers, including arts and music positions, just before 2:30 a.m.

The dozens of students and teachers in the meeting room stayed until the very end, even though they had to be to school first thing in the morning.

An unprecedented 80 members of the public spoke during the board meeting, all of them calling on the district to spare cuts to music and art teachers. They have also started an online petition that has more than 1,200 signatures.

The district did not commit to saving those positions, but instead voted to prioritize cutting other positions first. Positions targeted for reductions involve elective courses.

School districts are required to send preliminary layoff notices to staff by mid-March of each year. Final decisions will be made during the annual budget process.

On Tuesday, board members voted 3-2 to send the 85 preliminary layoff notices to staff. Members Gabe Escobedo, Rose Munoz and Sunita Beall voted in favor, and Celeste Kafri and Bill Banning voted against it.

Kafri, who joined in January, emerged as a new force on the panel. She defended arts and music teachers, and unabashedly called on the district management to change its outlook, and focus cuts on administration, not classrooms.

“To me, without a doubt, we need to say we cannot cut arts electives or elementary specialists,” Kafri said to a loud ovation from the crowd.

“I think we need to be talking about where else we can cut,” Kafri said. “How do we impact students as little as possible?”

Kafri noted that she has a master’s in business administration from UCLA and a certificate in education finance from Georgetown University.

She said she examined the district’s audited financials and discovered that the district has increased spending in every category for the past several years, although enrollment has dropped 15%.

“If we make cuts like this, we are going to be driving people outside our district,” Kafri said. “I don’t think we are going to be offering appealing programming, and we do have lots of competitors.”

Kafri said school site administration on a per-pupil basis has increased 28% since 2022.

“I think we can reduce the amount we are spending on school site administration,” Kafri said.

She also said spending on district management has increased from $12.4 million to $15.4 million since 2022.

“Does it make sense to right-size management,” Kafri said. “It might. If we have fewer students maybe we need fewer managers, and we need to have more investment in the arts.”

Kafri’s comments marked a stark departure from previous board members who lockstep followed Superintendent Hilda Maldonado’s lead.

Banning pushed back against Kafri and told her that there wasn’t time to come up with serious alternatives at the 11th hour. The district is required by state law to send preliminary layoff notices by March 15 to teachers, he said.

Kafri called for a special meeting on Wednesday or Thursday of this week to come up with alternatives to cutting arts teachers, but the board members said there wasn’t enough time to do so and still make the March 15 deadline.

This frustrated Kafri and fellow board member Beall, who both said they wanted to talk about cuts a month ago.

Kafri urged the district to join the Alliance for Smarter School Spending, made up of school districts around the country to look at progressive ways to budget, and shift some of the power away from the district management.

Banning, although he recited how much he loved the arts and was a band leader in school, dismissed Kafri’s efforts, suggesting the process exists for a reason, and that the district would be in financial peril if it did not approve the layoff notices.

“I worry about decisions this critical starting out with back-of-the-envelope stuff,” Banning said.

He said more analysis would need to be done on the impact of cutting management positions.

He noted that he has been involved in education finance for 45 years and the process is an annual one. The layoff notices, he said, will go to a large group, but once the district knows how much money it is getting from the state after the budget is released, many layoff notices will be rescinded, bringing the number down to about 18.

“These layoffs are not going to turn out with a vast disappearance of teachers,” Banning said.

Despite his confidence that many teachers will remain in the district, he declined to remove the art teachers from the list of potential cuts.

Throughout the meeting, Kafri pointed to the crowd, both in the board room and the nearby overflow room, and said that it was clear the public wanted to save the arts programs.

Tuesday’s meeting began at 6 p.m., but many people in the crowd arrived as early as 4 p.m. to get a seat. The meeting went through dinner and they ordered Rusty’s Pizza to the meeting room at district headquarters.

At one point, a teacher brought the student trustee of the school board, Erick Gonzalez, a slice of pepperoni pizza and warm Cup Noodles because he had sat there for seven hours.

The crowd was frustrated with the board and the administration at several points in the evening. Although there were students and teachers waiting to testify during public comment, the board moved an agenda item about Harding University Partnership School ahead of the layoff discussion, which drew boos from the crowd.

When the layoff item finally started, the board decided to hear from online speakers first.

Michael Kiyoi, instrumental music director at San Marcos High School, went directly to the microphone to ask the board to let the students in the room speak first. By this time, it was about 9 p.m.

The students testified emotionally about how music and art had changed their lives, and begged the district to not cut those positions.

One of the students who spoke was 16-year-old Naomi Jane Voigt, a sophomore at San Marcos High School.

“The arts has completely changed my life, my entire life,” said Voigt, who is also the 2025 Santa Barbara Teen Star. “It has given me not only the ability to sing and discover who I am as an individual, but it has helped me academically and emotionally.”

She said her family chose San Marcos for its arts and music program. She said she has millions of streams on Spotify and 108,000 monthly listeners.

“We are hurt, offended and frustrated,” Voigt said. “Without the arts programs, I would not have the confidence to express myself and share my art with the world.”

Voigt said “music saved me.”

Dos Pueblos High School student Benjamin Minor said he started to learn the piano at age 5. He learned the clarinet in the fifth grade through the district. He joined his junior high and eventually Dos Pueblos High School’s band.

“In high school, I have truly found my passion for music,” Minor said.

He thanked all of his music teachers.

“All these great teachers that I have had, that work for our district, that have made music fun,” Minor said. “If positions like these get cut, that might limit the ability for me to take all the music classes I have been able to take this year during my senior year.

“It won’t only impact me. It’s going to impact my peers in my music classes, students in junior high class and students learning their instruments in elementary school.”

Although the district did not remove arts and music teachers from the preliminary layoffs list, it did take off 3.5 full-time equivalent elementary school instructional specialists, at the request of board president Gabe Escobedo.

He also suggested potentially eliminating district-paid transportation for about 18 students for a zero period at Goleta Valley Junior High School.

Tuesday’s meeting was perhaps a turning point in the now years-long battle between teachers and the district administration, led by Maldonado.

Hired in 2020, Maldonado built an almost entirely new cabinet of administrators, some of whom she worked with previously. Dozens of management staff and senior leaders have left the district since 2020.

Last year, teachers protested, marched and rallied, calling for higher wages, further fueling the acrimony. They almost called for a strike until a state mediator forced the two sides to reach a contract deal.

Kafri’s efforts to shine a light on management signaled a new way of thinking for a board that up until Tuesday night had consistently supported Maldonado’s agenda and defended her against public criticism.

In a statement to Noozhawk after the meeting, Maldonado said:

“We are committed to navigating these challenges with transparency, compassion, and an unwavering focus on our students’ success and wellness. Next year our district’s resources, people, time and money, will be different but the goals to improve student outcomes and experiences will continue to be our north star.”