Striking Teachers Look to Parents

Striking Tustin teachers will be on picket lines instead of in classrooms today for the fourth day, and union officials say they hope “community pressure” at a school board meeting tonight will force the board to resume negotiations.

The president of the five-member Tustin Unified School District Board of Trustees said Sunday, however, that she seriously doubts that any change will come from the meeting at 7:30 tonight.

“We have nothing (involving the strike) on our regular agenda,” said the board president, Dorothy Ralston. “People will, of course, be allowed to address the board during the hearing part of the meeting. . . . But I’ve said and said again that our offer (made before the strike began last Wednesday) was our final one.”

Leaflets Distributed

Sandy Banis, president of the striking Tustin Educators Assn., has repeatedly said that the impasse between union and school board negotiators can only be broken by “community involvement.” Toward that end, the striking teachers last week distributed more than 25,000 leaflets to Tustin residents, urging them to come to tonight’s school board meeting.

Banis said parents of schoolchildren are showing increasing support for the teachers. But she said that support needs to be demonstrated to the school board, which has refused to schedule any negotiations since making its “final offer” on Sept. 26.

A large crowd is expected at the board meeting, said Hazel Stover, a California Teachers Assn. board member who is helping the Tustin local of the CTA.

“The parents of this community have to become involved and tell the board to go back to the bargaining table,” Stover said Sunday. “This current situation is ridiculous.”

But Ralston said she did not expect any change by the board. “The board took the position it took in a very conscious, very reasoning way,” she said. “We knew we would have to live with the consequences. When you make a difficult decision, you have to consider all the possible consequences, including a work stoppage.”

The board’s position, essentially, is its final offer of Sept. 26. That was a proposal to give the teachers a total 8.2% pay raise this year and a pledge of “not less than 4%” in 1986-87. In addition, the board proposed giving senior teachers added pay increments and pledged to devote 40% of the district’s forthcoming money from the state lottery to reduce class sizes.

Offer Called ‘Insult’

The teachers rejected the board’s offer last Monday. Union officials said it was “an insult” because it failed to offer the teachers anything for last school year, in which they worked without a formal contract. The teachers are asking for a 6.3% increase for last year and an 8.1% pay hike this school year.

“Strikes don’t produce more money,” responded schools Supt. Maurice Ross. “The district just doesn’t have the money. We’ve offered to let the union look at our books, and we’re confident to do so because they’ve already been audited by the state, the county and an independent auditor.”

Ralston said Sunday that she is “absolutely convinced” that the union’s principal reason for striking is to seek mandatory “agency fees” and binding arbitration. Agency fees are a form of union dues; the union contends that it should receive fees from all teachers--even the estimated 40% who do not belong to the union--because it acts as bargaining agent for everyone. Binding arbitration would require that a neutral third party have the final word in resolving disputes between teachers and the administration.

Stover, of the California Teachers Assn., said that Ralston and other board members are using talk of agency fees and binding arbitration as “a smoke screen.”

“That’s the excuse they want to use for not dealing with the problem,” Stover said. “The association is waiting for a reasonable counterproposal. The board knows that those issues (agency fees and binding arbitration) were removed from the (bargaining) table back in March, but that there still wasn’t any movement.” She said the two items thus were resubmitted as demands in subsequent contract talks, but that they remain negotiable.

Among the sources of disagreement between the union and board is where Tustin teachers rank in compensation compared with teachers in nearby districts.

Stover said that the average Tustin teacher makes $29,009 a year, “and that’s 29th out of 29 districts in Orange County. . . . The teachers in Tustin are getting ripped off.”

But Ross, the district superintendent, has said the average Tustin teacher makes $29,764 a year and that the average is among the highest in Orange County.

Teachers went on strike last Wednesday after more than a year of unsuccessful negotiations with the school district. The teachers’ last contract expired in June, 1984.

The strike last week culminated with a walkout Friday by about 300 of the roughly 1,800 students at Foothill High School. Ralston, the school board president, on Sunday called that walkout “unfortunate” and said she hoped there will be no more such incidents.

Stover praised the student walkout, saying “it was a tremendous boost” for the teachers. Stover, who is a teacher at Orange High School in the neighboring Orange Unified School District, represents half of Orange County in the statewide union and has frequently been at the Tustin teacher rallies to give advice and encouragement.

Ross has claimed that the statewide union has targeted Tustin “because all the neighboring districts have given agency fees and our district hasn’t.”

Teacher association officials, however, say Ross, Ralston and other Tustin Unified administrators are using the “union issue” as a “red herring” to try to alarm conservative residents of the Tustin area.