Ferrero’s Chaos Is Finally in Order

Chuck Ferrero has a lot on his mind these days. He is concerned with blitzing linebackers, seemingly unstoppable running backs and linemen who can’t be budged.

And he couldn’t be happier.

Because it’s a lot better than facing blitzing administrators, seemingly unstoppable policies and a Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees that couldn’t be budged.

Ferrero, Valley College football coach, figures nothing he encounters on the field could possibly match the problems he has had to tackle over the last year.

It was last March that Ferrero was first informed he was being laid off. After six years as a physical education instructor and football coach, he was losing his job. But because he also has a master’s degree in earth sciences, he was able to get a new community college position teaching geography, an area where teachers weren’t being laid off.

He was determined to hang on to the football job. Except he couldn’t be head coach.

Why? Silly question.

That position first had to be offered to someone who had been laid off from the physical education department.

Wasn’t Ferrero a member of the physical education department?

Another silly question. Of course not. Not any more. He was now officially an earth sciences teacher.

Totally confused? Read on.

Before Ferrero could get back the job that had been his for six years, the job would first have to be offered to someone on a waiting list for employment. The only way Ferrero, who has a wife and four young children, could get on that list would be to give up his job teaching geography and voluntarily join the unemployed.

One possible alternative would be for the head football coach job to be given to someone on the waiting list, someone perhaps totally unqualified, while Ferrero accepted a position as an assistant coach. He would then run the team as he always had while a figurehead took the job title and the pay.

It was in this atmosphere of uncertainty that Ferrero conducted spring football practice and continued to prepare for a season that might never come off.

“I didn’t want to teach geography in addition to football,” he says. “I was already spending up to 16 hours a day on football. And that includes Saturdays and Sundays. Now, the little amount of time I had left to spend with my family was gone. There were no hours to sleep.”

Last week, a couple of days before the start of school, it was all resolved. Almost all the teachers who had been laid off were reinstated. Ferrero was relieved of his earth sciences obligations and put back where he was before.

So what did it all mean?

“I can’t make any sense out of it,” says George Goff, men’s athletic director at Valley College. “It looks asinine. It was total chaos. I don’t know what their motives were. I think the district was under tremendous political pressure from the state for mismanagement. One of the recommendations to them was to lay off staff and do some reorganization. I think they were trying to prove to somebody that they were doing something, instead of just sitting around, which is what they have always done.”

Says Lindsay Conner, member of the district’s board of trustees: “This is the first time the district has undertaken the layoff process. No one had any precise expectation of how long it would take or what it would involve. We were aware that we had to restructure in order to be competitive. There was only one process we could take to accomplish that, and it was through layoffs.”

The purpose of the layoffs, according to Conner, was to get more teachers in growing academic areas such as English as a second language, business and mathematics and away from areas such as physical education that had too many instructors. By having more teachers in growing academic areas, Conner says, the district has been able to serve more students, district enrollment being up by about 12% over 1985.

But things changed. A new agreement was reached that reduced the teaching load for coaches, creating the need for more teachers. So many of the layoffs were rescinded.

“We had not anticipated our needs,” says Virginia Mulrooney, vice chancellor of personnel services for the district. “We had to fill those positions.”

So is this finally the end of it?

Says Ferrero: “I hope to God.”