Tustin Teachers Set for Strike Today in Dispute With Board

After more than a year of dispute, Tustin’s 410 teachers are scheduled to go on strike this morning.

“We don’t want to strike, but there is no alternative,” said Sandy Banis, president of the Tustin Educators Assn., on Tuesday. She said teachers will vote this afternoon on whether to continue the strike another day.

Tustin Unified School District officials stressed that all schools will be open today. “We have 50 more substitute teachers than we need, and all our subs are certificated and qualified,” said Supt. Maurice Ross.

Picketing at All Schools

Union officials said teachers will be picketing all schools in the district, starting about a half hour before the first class this morning.

Ross said Tuesday that he expects no trouble, “but we have conferred with local police, the sheriff’s office and also will have more parents than usual in the schools, helping as aides, on Wednesday.”

Tustin’s teachers have been moving toward a strike for several months. They authorized a work action in a vote last winter, and in late August set Oct. 2 as the date if negotiations didn’t produce an acceptable contract. On Monday, a meeting of about 200 teachers reaffirmed the strike for today.

Pay, work hours and union rights are major issues in the strike. But Ross himself is the “issue” most frequently mentioned by teacher and union officials. “The man (Ross) is totally unreasonable,” said Bill Ribblett, a California Teachers Assn. official who is a consultant for the Tustin teachers.

Ribblett and other union officials claim that Ross has spearheaded what they call an “unresponsive” district attitude toward the teachers’ requests for better pay.

Ross, who has been superintendent of the district since 1977, said Tuesday that he is simply carrying out the orders of the school board. The board, because of declining pupil enrollment, did not get enough money from the state to give teachers a cost-of-living raise last year, Ross said.

‘Targeted by the Union’

“It’s ridiculous for some of the teachers to say that I’m ‘anti-education,’ ” said Ross. “I was a teacher before I became an administrator. My wife is a teacher. My mother was a teacher.”

Ross said he and the school board have come under fire from some teachers “because we’ve been targeted by the union--Tustin is the only district in our area of the county that hasn’t given agency fees to the union, and the state union is bearing down on this.”

An “agency fee” is a variation of compulsory union membership. Under agency fee arrangements, all teachers pay an equal share to the union for the cost of representing them--whether or not they choose to join the union. Tustin Unified officials claim that 40% of teachers in the district aren’t union members and don’t want to be.

But Banis, president of the Tustin union, said Tuesday that the agency fee is one of only several issues to be resolved. She noted that the union earlier this year dropped insistence on an agency fee and binding arbitration during the negotiations, “but it didn’t accomplish anything, so now (the issues are) back on the table.”

Binding arbitration is the requirement that a school district and union agree to follow the recommendations of a neutral third party whenever there is a dispute the two sides cannot resolve.

Proposal Rejected

Banis reiterated Tuesday that pay is a major issue in the dispute. “All other districts in Orange County gave teachers a pay raise last year,” she said. “Tustin didn’t. The state gave Tustin money last year, so it must have been mismanagement on the part of the school administration.”

Ross, however, said that the school district got only enough money from the state last year to offer a 3.8% pay raise to the teachers for working longer hours--part of a state-mandated education reform. The teachers rejected the proposed 3.8% pay raise in a June referendum held by the union. Banis said the teachers rejected the proposal because they were also insisting on a separate cost-of-living pay raise.

The teachers’ last formal contract with the district expired in June, 1984. Last week the school board made what Ross said was “the final offer.” That offer was for an 8.2% pay raise for this school year and “not less than a 4% raise” for next year. No retroactive raise for the 1984-85 school year was offered in the package.

Declining Enrollment

Banis said the offer angered the teachers because the school board was acting as if “1984-85 didn’t even exist.”

Ribblett said the Tustin teachers union is demanding a 3.8% cost-of-living raise for last year, plus at least a 2% raise for the teachers’ having had to work longer hours. In 1985-86, Ribblett said, the union is asking for a 6.1% cost-of-living raise and another 2% raise for longer hours.

The school board’s proposal of 8.1% for 1985-86 is for a combined cost-of-living and longer-hours pay raise. The board, however, made that offer contingent on no retroactive raise for last year.

Tustin Unified, like many Orange County districts, started losing enrollment in the mid-1970s. District enrollment peaked in 1976 at about 15,000; last year the enrollment was about 10,000. Since the state gives funding on the basis of enrollment, Tustin Unified’s income has dropped sharply during the past nine years.

“We had to lay off some teachers in the spring of 1978, but we’ve avoided that since then,” Ross said on Tuesday. “I’ve had to close nine schools, for which I was under fire, and I’ve pared down the size of the administrative staff from 63 administrators to 37. But we just didn’t have money for a cost-of-living pay raise for the teachers last year.”

According to district figures, the average pay of teachers in Tustin Unified last year was $29,764, which is considered competitive with annual salaries in other Orange County districts, according to county education officials.

The last teachers’ strike in Orange County was on Feb. 5, when Irvine Unified teachers staged a one-day walkout.

Ribblett said Tuesday that he hopes the Tustin strike also will only last one day. Banis said that “the teachers will vote every day whether to continue the strike for another day.”