Schools Can Afford Pay Raises, L.A. Teachers Say in Protests

Saying that the district has ample money to build schools and increase teachers’ pay, about two-thirds of the Los Angeles school district’s 32,000 teachers demonstrated outside their schools before classes Monday to protest what they said was a lack of progress toward resolving a salary dispute.

Wayne Johnson, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, said the local teachers union is asking for a 15% raise for the current school year, which would increase beginning pay to $23,000 and top scale to about $40,000.

The district, drawing on lottery and general funds, has offered all district employees a 6% increase, which would cost $87.1 million. Once an agreement is reached it will be retroactive to July 1, the beginning of the school year.

The teachers are working under a contract that is in effect until 1988, but it allows for renegotiation each year of the amount of pay increases and certain other benefits. Johnson said that if no progress is made toward resolving the wage dispute by Jan. 23, then “we will contemplate serious action.”

District spokesman Bill Rivera said the district’s offer is commensurate with wage increases offered by most school districts in the county this year and is higher than the 2.5% average raise given in collective bargaining agreements with private industry.

The district’s highest spending priority, he noted, is to relieve overcrowded conditions in many schools. The district has received state approval for 18 construction projects with a projected cost of $360 million.

But Johnson said that if the district uses lottery funds, it can afford to pay teachers more than a 6% raise without diminishing its school-construction efforts.

“The district wants to paint us as a greedy bunch of people who want to take away money for building schools,” he said at a press conference outside Marshall High School in the Los Feliz area, where about 100 teachers carried placards critical of the district’s offer. “That’s not true. They’ve got plenty of money for building.”

The district expects to have $133 million in lottery revenues by next year, Rivera said. The board has appropriated $50 million of that for salary increases, and about $25 million for relief of overcrowding, including the cost of transporting students from crowded campuses and additional support services for the receiving schools.

“The union is making a big pitch that there’s big pot of money around,” he said. “The truth is, there is no money available without having to substantially shortchange what the board has to do to provide for relief of overcrowding.”

The current pay scale ranges from $20,600 for beginning teachers to $35,500 for teachers with at least 14 years of experience. Johnson said Los Angeles ranks 25th in teacher pay among the 42 districts in Los Angeles County.

Rivera, however, said that when bonuses for master’s degrees are added in, the district ranks 11th in the county.

Effect of Spending Limit

Union officials said they must secure a substantial raise for teachers this year because they may not be able to obtain one next year, when a statewide measure limiting public spending takes effect. Proposition 4, passed by voters in 1979, placed a lid on spending increases by all levels of government, including school districts, beginning in July, 1987. According to Johnson, district spending will be allowed to grow no more than 2.4%, “which means we’re not going to get a raise next year.”

Johnson said raising teachers’ pay to “a livable level” is imperative if the district is to attract enough qualified teachers in the next several years. He said as many as one-third of the district’s teaching force will retire in the next six or seven years and more may leave out of dissatisfaction over working conditions and pay.