Bitter Lessons : Compton School Labor Standoff Has Ugly Edge

The voice on the telephone Wednesday morning was icy and anonymous:

“You’re on top now. But you’re gonna be down soon. You better watch out for yourself and your family. These kids you’re keeping out of school are gonna come back to get you.”

Click.

Kelvin D. Filer, one of seven trustees in a school district that has been crippled by teacher strikes over 2 1/2 months, took the call as a death threat and reported it to police.

“I have the voice on tape, it was on my recorder,” Filer said. “It’s a female voice that I recognized because she’s called before. . . . I’m not taking it lightly.”

Filer and other Compton Unified School District officials have been getting lots of calls lately, at home and at work, day and night, from people angry that the teachers’ demand for higher pay remains unmet.

Dirty Tricks

But the threatening call--and a police investigation into a report that Supt. Ted D. Kimbrough is the target of a murder “contract”--are only the most menacing examples of the dirty tricks, harassment and pressure tactics that school officials contend are being used to force a strike settlement. For example:

Bogus newspaper classified advertisements have been placed in the names of board members, offering rooms for rent and listing their phone numbers. They have been charged for the ads and deluged with inquiries.

Plumbers have been sent to their houses at all hours of the day.

On three occasions, a rental company tried to deliver a construction site portable toilet to Filer’s residence.

Union handbills have spread the home and work phone numbers of all board members throughout the city, and Filer said, “The calls never stop.”

And union pickets “followed me to the courthouse,” said Filer, a criminal defense lawyer. “They followed me from courtroom to courtroom. . . . They followed me as I went to the record store and I purchased some videos. They followed me as I had lunch in a sandwich shop. . . . They’ve gone to my church and stood up and made an announcement that other members should call me and put pressure on me to give the teachers what they want.”

Illegal Acts Denied

Union spokesmen say they are pressuring board members, but deny condoning pranks or illegal acts. In any case, school board members say that the pressure won’t work.

“None of that stuff is going to affect my decisions,” Filer said. “I don’t want anyone to think they can put pressure on me to do anything. They cannot, they cannot .”

On Monday, Administrative Law Judge James W. Tamm will begin acting as a mediator between the teachers, who seek a raise of at least 7.3% next year, and administrators, who are offering a 5% increase. Starting salaries in the district range from $20,219 to $34,870 annually, depending on the teacher’s educational credits.

Teachers stayed home from work on Wednesday--the 13th day since the on-again, off-again job action began Nov. 11--but agreed to return to their classrooms at least through Tuesday. Kimbrough estimates that the strike has cost the district at least $3 million as a result of slumping student attendance figures that are used to determine state aid.

Although the mediator’s recommendations will be non-binding, contract negotiators believe that an outsider’s view might at least cool the rising temperatures between the instructional and administrative employees of Los Angeles County’s third largest--but poorest paid--public school system.

“I think because of the prolonged nature of it,” Kimbrough said, “it has reached an emotional level that’s going to have to be addressed by the district and (the teachers’ union) to heal the wounds that exist.”

Pat Ryan, a 28-year Compton High School Spanish teacher who serves as president of the 1,200-member Compton Education Assn., acknowledges that “yes, we are putting pressure on school board members.”

“We are picketing their residences. And in the case of Lynn Dymally (daughter of Rep. Mervyn M. Dymally (D-Compton)), we are picketing her father’s office. We are picketing the businesses of Mr. Filer and Mrs. (Mary) Henry because they’re the ones who have to feel the change.”

Threats Not Intended

But Ryan emphasized that “I don’t know of any threats. That is not our intention. It could be anybody.”

Ryan said union members are “extremely upset” that district administrators and four of the seven board members “are saying that they have the best interests of teachers in mind . . . but their actions don’t show it.”

“Yes, we’re frustrated and angry,” not only because of salaries but because of working conditions.

“I’m teaching in a room that has leaked for three years,” Ryan said. “The night before I go home, if I know it’s going to rain, I put a bucket where it leaks. Hey, I can take that for so long. You just reach a point when you’re mad as hell and you’re not gonna take it any longer.”

Teachers are not picketing Trustees Sam Littleton, John Steward or Bernice Woods because each has stated unequivocal support for the union’s pay demand. “You don’t antagonize your friends,” Ryan explained.

Ryan said emotions have been running high since she and 19 other union leaders were arrested Jan. 13 for illegally occupying a conference room in the school Administration Building.

“It wasn’t very pleasant for all of us who went; it was our first contact with the criminal justice system,” she said. The union members, Ryan said, were given “the royal treatment” by security officers and Compton police. They were handcuffed, fingerprinted five times “and they took our picture and our personal property down to our shoes. We had to walk around on those cold floors.”

One member of the group caught pneumonia and was hospitalized, she said.

Much of the teachers’ anger has been aimed at Kimbrough, who was hired by the school board in 1982 to initiate a variety of financial and instructional reforms that have often been controversial.

Two weeks ago, Kimbrough said, a school staff member telephoned his home late at night and told how his daughter had witnessed “an arrangement being made” to have the superintendent killed.

Police Launch Probe

Police officials have interviewed the staffer and are investigating, Kimbrough said.

“I’m not saying that the teachers’ organization is doing that,” Kimbrough said, “but it is definitely connected to the current conditions here in the school district.”

Late last week, district negotiators filed 10 unfair-labor-practice charges against the union, among other things accusing members of encouraging students not to attend school and “threatening reprisals” against parents who send them anyway.

“We would categorically deny that the union has done anything of that nature,” union spokesman John Burritt said.

Kimbrough also acknowledged that district negotiators have what purports to be a list of union “strategies for disrupting negotiations” with tactics such as telephoning board members, criticizing the superintendent and shifting the focus of negotiations to “poor working conditions, poor educational programs, poor heating systems, etc. . . . to get the board to offer more money and benefits in order to avoid bad publicity.”

“First of all,” Kimbrough said, “I can’t divulge how I got it. Secondly, it’s been followed almost to the letter, so obviously, by its implementation, it is the (Compton union’s) plan.”

Tactics ‘Not Ours’

Ryan said flatly that the strategy document “is not ours.”

“That’s not where we’re coming from,” she said. “Our intent is to get out there and settle this as quickly as possible. You’re looking at teachers who have lost 13 days pay. You can’t afford that if you look at what we’re paid.

Caught between the warring administrators and teachers are the 29,000 kindergarten-through-adult-education students who attend the district’s 36 schools. Officials on both sides express regret that those students have had nearly half a semester of studies disrupted. District officials say the strike has been particularly hard on high school seniors working for grades that will allow them to enter college next year.

“It just can’t go on too much longer,” Ryan said. “This Friday was the end of the first semester. We’re in the midst of finals now.”

Last month, Kimbrough even received personal letters from 27 McKinley Elementary School sixth-graders, urging him to help settle the salary dispute.

Letter From Student

One unabashed student signed his name after writing ungrammatically, “I just want to know why you want give the teacher what they want so they could give us are education we need it really badly you are ready got yours now we need ares so give the teacher what they want. You are ruining there lives because you want give them what want. you rotten sink rat cowrdy, roach cow. Thank you.”

“I am beginging to Hate you,” wrote another student, “and I am beginging to not really care about me going to high school. If you care give our teachers there right amout of money. our school’s look like a peace of junk like we have ten million rat’s and roaches.”

Still another student echoed the resentment many teachers feel about Kimbrough’s $80,931 salary, which makes him the fourth-highest paid superintendent in the county, according to the most recent salary survey by the county Office of Education.

Kimbrough said the letters were apparently written during class time under a teacher’s supervision.

“I think from a purely professional point of view,” he said, “it’s a terrible thing to do to children. It saddens me that someone has been able to orchestrate a young mind and reinforce a feeling of hate toward any human. We all know we need love, we don’t need hate in this world.”

“Besides that,” the superintendent said of the students’ letters, “the grammar was terrible.”