Brea-Olinda Teachers Will Stay in Class : Today’s Strike Averted When Pay Dispute Goes Into Mediation

A teachers’ strike was averted Wednesday in the Brea-Olinda Unified School District, but the contract dispute remains unsettled.

Although teachers are unhappy about what one of them called “a limbo situation,” they will be in the classrooms today, their union leaders announced.

The 158 union teachers in the district had voted last week to begin a strike today if there was no satisfactory pay raise. Negotiations ended with no settlement Wednesday, but a state labor mediator’s action averted a walkout.

The mediator late Wednesday afternoon declared that the dispute between the school administration and the teachers was going into “fact-finding,” a formal, state-supervised process in which each side has a representative and there is a third, neutral representative studying the issues.

Negotiations Cease

Negotiation--offers and counteroffers--cease during the fact-finding process, which usually takes two or more months.

At issue in the dispute is a proposed pay raise for the third year of an existing three-year contract. The Brea-Olinda school district representatives Wednesday offered the teachers a 5% pay raise, retroactive to last September, and a $300 addition to the annual pay brackets of the district’s most experienced teachers.

The teachers’ union rejected the offer, saying that it wanted a 7% retroactive pay raise and $500 added to the most experienced teachers’ pay brackets.

Other proposals also were on the negotiating table Wednesday. The union said it wanted an “agency fee,” or a way of collecting the equivalent of dues from all teachers, whether or not they choose to belong to the union. The school board has rejected the concept of such a fee.

Also involved in the dispute are disagreements between teachers and administration on how the district will divide its California lottery money in future years. But despite the stalemated negotiations, the union leadership told the teachers that the strike has been called off.

‘No Use for Us to Walk’

“We feel there is no use for us to walk (go on strike) if we’re in fact-finding,” said Rachel Sweet, president of the Brea-Olinda Teachers Assn. She addressed about 100 Brea-Olinda teachers outside the Board of Education office in Brea after the last round of negotiations.

“We’re not walking tomorrow because it’s too expensive and won’t bring us anything,” she said.

Sweet noted that had the teachers gone on strike today, they would be forfeiting pay for each day they were out. She said the union is urging them to instead give a day’s pay to a new political action committee the union is starting.

“We’ve got to elect people on the school board who ask sharp questions of the administrators,” Sweet said.

District Supt. Edgar Z. Seal later told reporters that he is sorry the teachers rejected the school board’s last offer.

‘Really Can’t Afford Offer’

“The teachers deserve a pay raise, and the school board wants to give the pay raise to them,” Seal said. “We made an offer today that is going to require the district to cut back at least $600,000 in other expenditures. One thing that will probably be found in fact-finding is that the school district really can’t afford the offer it made today.”

Seal and union leader Sweet disagreed on the impact that fact-finding has on the last offer made by the school district. Sweet told other teachers Wednesday that the district’s last offer will remain viable through the months of fact-finding. But Seal emphatically disagreed.

“All bets are off now,” he declared. He said that fact-finding does not freeze the district’s last offer and that something less favorable to the teachers may now emerge from the process.