Teacher Unrest Raises Key Election Issues : Heated Campaigns Waged for Board Seats in Tustin and Huntington Beach

Teacher unrest stemming from unresolved contracts is the common theme of two of the hottest school board elections Tuesday in Orange County.

In the Tustin area, teachers have been without a contract since June, 1984. The teachers union went on strike earlier this month for six days. Now the union has vowed to oust two incumbent board members up for election Tuesday.

In the Huntington Beach-Fountain Valley-Westminster area, teachers in the Huntington Beach Union High School District have been without a contract since January. Dissatisfaction has been expressed through teacher sickouts, picketing, mass boycotts of classes and walkouts by sympathetic students. The union has said it will oust one incumbent seeking reelection Tuesday and win two other seats being vacated by members not seeking another term.

School superintendents are corollary issues in the two races.

During their strike, members of the Tustin Educators Assn. repeatedly said they wanted Supt. Maurice Ross fired.

In Huntington Beach, then-Supt. Frank Abbott provoked an unsuccessful recall effort against the incumbent school board majority when he forced the early retirement of popular Marina High School Principal Paul Berger in 1984.

Abbott left the district in August, 1984, to take a job as superintendent of a school district in Northern California. But the board, by a 4-1 vote, upheld Abbott’s earlier recommendation to remove Berger, despite pleas from students and parents.

One of the anti-incumbent candidates in the Huntington Beach Union High School District race said he became involved because of that controversy.

“I have two children attending Marina High, and I was unhappy when the incumbent board decided to get rid of Paul Berger as principal,” Jerry L. Sullivan said.

Sullivan, 50, of Huntington Beach said he worked in a parents’ effort to recall board members Brian Lake, Ronald Marcus and Stephen Smith. The effort failed, “but we got 8,000 or more signatures, more than the votes some of them were elected with,” Sullivan said. Other parents in the district then urged him to become a candidate, he said.

Sullivan is an English professor who also is in charge of students seeking teaching credentials at Cal State Long Beach. He holds a doctorate in education from the University of Northern Colorado.

He is one of three candidates endorsed by the district’s teacher union, the District Educators Assn.

“We’re all independent candidates,” Sullivan said. “I was actually recruited to run by the parents. I’m very much in sympathy with the plight of the teachers, but I’m very independent. I’m not going to turn the zoo over to the animals.”

Endorsed by Union

The other two candidates endorsed by the union are David K. Warfield and Bonnie P. Castrey.

Warfield, 30, a businessman who lives in Westminster, played key roles in the 1983 election of a new board majority of the Coast Community College District. Warfield, whose wife teaches at Orange Coast College, was chairman of a recall effort aimed at the previous college board after it voted to lay off about 100 teachers. The recall failed, but Warfield was campaign manager for two of the three union-endorsed candidates who replaced the board majority.

Warfield said he decided to run for the high school district board this year “because I saw some parallels between the way this board was operating and the way the Coast Community College District’s old board had operated.” Warfield cited the furor over the firing of Marina High Principal Berger as among the board’s “mistakes.”

He also criticized the board’s inability to negotiate a new contract with its teachers. “I think the community is ready to embrace the teachers’ cause,” Warfield said.

Castrey, 43, a businesswoman, said in a campaign flyer: “The current board majority has failed to provide open, creative and objective leadership. Our district needs change, but I will not tolerate cosmetic changes. I will insist on positive, lasting solutions.”

Castrey, Sullivan and Warfield, running as a team, have mailed joint literature. Teachers in the district have worn campaign buttons of the three candidates on parents’ nights.

The only Huntington Beach district incumbent seeking reelection is Stephen H. Smith, 42, who has been on the five-member school board since 1978.

“The main issue is whether there’s going to be an independent school board or a school board controlled by leadership of the teachers union,” Smith said. “A school board should be made up of independent-minded people who look at all the issues, not just what’s best for one special-interest group.”

Voted to Oust Principal

Smith was among those who voted to oust Berger. Smith said in a recent interview that academic standards had slipped at Marina High under Berger.

“For instance, the English teachers were not providing any instruction on Fridays; they taught four days a week and took Fridays off,” Smith said. “I know it (the demotion of Berger) was the right decision, but I’m sad it had to be made.”

Smith said that parents in the district have told him that they’re angry about the sickouts and other job protests by the teachers last spring.

Candidate Robert Ernest Gerard, 25, a private-school teacher, also is critical of the teachers’ protests last spring.

“But this isn’t excusing the incumbent board,” Gerard said. “They’ve let things stagnate too long.”

Gerard said teachers in the district “aren’t doing a competent job” in educating the students. “They’re turning out students who’re not able to face graduate studies and life.”

Gerard, a graduate student in philosophy at Cal State Long Beach, teaches at Page School in Costa Mesa.

Former Trustee

Maxwell N. Sudakow, 45, a businessman and former trustee of the Ocean View Elementary School District, is also running for the high school district board. Sudakow said that he thinks it would be unwise for the board to be dominated by three union-endorsed candidates.

“A slate of three on a public board of five members is no longer a public board,” he said.

“We need a broad representation from the community so that we don’t give away the store.”

Sudakow served on the Ocean View board from 1978 to 1983. He said he would use his business experience to “work toward solutions of the problems of providing the students of the community with the best product of education that the resources allow.”

The seventh candidate in the race is George A. Hanna, 55, a tool and die maker. Hanna, an unsuccessful candidate for the board two years ago, has said he would keep any students with acquired immune deficiency syndrome out of classes. He has also said that he wants a return of “classical education.”

In the Tustin Unified School District, only four active candidates are left in the race to fill two school board seats. Two of them are incumbents, and two are challengers supported by the teachers union, the Tustin Educators Assn.

Appointed to Board

One of the incumbents is Dorothy Ralston, 55, the current board president, who was appointed to the board to fill a vacancy in 1983. She is now seeking her first four-year elected term.

Ralston said that the statewide California Teachers Assn. has caused the turmoil in the Tustin district. She said the statewide union wants Tustin Unified to agree to “agency fees,” which means all teachers, whether union members or not, would have to pay fees to the union.

Ralston said the union also is strongly pushing for binding arbitration, which would require a third party’s decision to be final in a labor dispute. The incumbent board, Ralston said, unanimously opposes “mandatory union membership” and binding arbitration.

“The issue is will the school district be controlled by elected representatives, or will it be controlled by a statewide union,” Ralston said. She also charged that a key goal of the union is to oust Supt. Ross.

And the union’s charge that the incumbent board members are “puppets of Ross,” she said, is “an absurdity.”

“The strike was staged to serve the union’s purpose,” Ralston said. “Clearly, the attitude of this board toward our (teaching) staff has been misrepresented by the union. We respect our teachers and regard them as professionals.”

The other incumbent seeking reelection is an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Edward H. Boseker, 49.

“The main issue is union control of our district,” Boseker said. “The union wants to defeat the incumbents and recall the remainder of the board.

‘Where the Money Is’

“We should be debating and discussing other issues pertaining to education of our students, such as how to teach better the basic subjects, but instead we’re all having to deal with the issue of union control.”

Boseker said that teacher unions, with their demands for higher salaries, “should be addressing their concerns in Sacramento, where the money is.”

Jane Bauer, 40, an attorney, is one of the two challengers in the Tustin race. She said that she was surprised when she learned that the teachers union had decided to support her. “The first I knew of it was when I read about it in the newspaper,” she said.

Bauer said: “I have not taken any money from the union, and I do not agree with many of their demands. For instance, I’m opposed to agency fees and I’m opposed to the proposed recall.

“I’m for binding arbitration if the arbitrator can be decided ahead of time.”

Bauer said she would postpone a decision on whether the district should retain Ross. “It’s not fair to judge him on the labor dispute,” she said. “I would want to evaluate his other skills.”

The other challenger backed by the teachers union also said that she would not immediately seek to fire Ross.

Candidate Gloria Tuchman, 43, said it “would be unfair to prejudge” Ross and that she would have “a fair and open mind” about him. She said, however, that “he doesn’t seem very open, at this point, in negotiations; he has a take-it-or-leave-it attitude.”

21 Years in the Classroom

Tuchman is a first-grade teacher at Taft School in Santa Ana Unified School District, which borders the Tustin district. A teacher for 21 years, she said: “I feel my experience in the education field will be an asset.”

Like Bauer, Tuchman said that she had no advance notice that the teachers union would support her.

“The big issue is getting a workable contract,” she said. “My feeling on agency fees is that it’s a negotiable item with me; I don’t have a closed mind about it. I would be in support of binding arbitration as long as there’s a no-strike clause added to it. The Santa Ana district has binding arbitration with a no-strike clause, and there’ve been no problems.”