Students Don’t Walk Out; Teachers Return

A threatened walkout by about 1,000 students at Tustin High School failed to materialize Thursday as teachers throughout the district returned to their classrooms for the first time since Oct. 2. Despite tense relations during the strike the past two weeks, both sides on Thursday reported no serious incidents.

“It’s amazingly calm,” said Bill Ribblett, a California Teachers Assn. consultant working with the Tustin Educators Assn.

Both sides said they are pleased that the threatened student strike at Tustin High didn’t happen. Sandy Banis, president of the Tustin Educators Assn., had issued a statement on Wednesday urging the students not to go through with the threatened walkout in support of the teachers.

“It’s been our strike, not theirs,” Banis said. “We don’t want the students to be involved, although we certainly appreciate their support.”

Although the teachers returned to their schools, the union made it clear that the strike is only suspended and not officially over. The teachers, by a unanimous vote on Wednesday, authorized the union executive board to resume the strike at any time.

The teachers also voted unanimously to seek political action to oust the five school board members. Banis said the immediate goal is to defeat two incumbents, board president Dorothy Ralston and member Edward Boseker, in the Nov. 5 election.

Ribblett said that while the teachers haven’t “endorsed” other candidates formally, they have “given their position of support” to Gloria Tuchman, who also is a teacher, and Jane Bauer, an attorney. Five candidates will be on the Tustin Unified School District ballot, and the top two vote-getters will be elected. The fifth candidate is Jim McBride, a project engineer.

In addition to trying to defeat Ralston and Boseker, the Tustin Educators Assn. also is seeking the recall of the other three board members, Barbara Benson, Joyce Hanson and Chris Layton.

“We’ve been getting a lot of calls this morning from parents who say they support our position” on the election and recall efforts, Ribblett said. “Even one woman who said she spoke against us at the Monday night school board meeting called and said she’s now reconsidered because she’s realized the trustees just have refused to negotiate.”

A key issue in the strike by 240 of Tustin’s 397 classroom teachers was the break-off of negotiations on Sept. 26 after the board presented what it called its “final offer.”

Supt. Maurice Ross said that the teachers forced the board to make a final offer and thus preclude more negotiations. “Normally talks go through negotiations, mediation and fact-finding before there’s a strike,” Ross said. “We already had fact-finding scheduled for Oct. 14, but when the teachers voted for a strike on Oct. 2, the board, to be in good faith, had to present everything it had available and make its last, best offer in an effort to stave off the strike. That’s what the board did on Sept. 26.”

Ross has said that the board is ready to explain details of the offer but that negotiations can’t be resumed “because there’s nothing left to negotiate.”

Banis and other union officials have decried the position of Ross and the school board. They have said that collective bargaining requires a willingness on both sides to keep negotiations open.

Ralston, at Monday night’s board meeting, told the teachers that the union repeatedly has rebuffed school board efforts to find a solution. Ralston noted that the teachers on June 10 voted down a proposed contract that would have given them a 3.8% raise retroactive to July 1, 1984.

“Then on June 27, we made another proposal, and you made no response,” Ralston said. “On July 22, we made another proposal, and you made no response. After the failure to get an agreement, we entered into fact-finding.” Fact-finding is a state-supervised, formal procedure in which three people try to determine the basic points in a dispute and then propose a non-binding solution. Each side names one person on the fact-finding team, and the third is mutually agreed upon.

Banis charged Thursday that the substitute teachers, each of whom received $180 a day, had failed to educate students during the past six school days. “In my class, my substitute failed even to follow the book,” Banis said. “I’m going to have to undo everything. It’s as if there had been no instruction, and it makes me angry.”

She said that other teachers have also said that “there was no real instruction” while the regular teachers were gone.