Teachers Staging Walkout Today; Schools to Stay Open

All 618 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District will be open for a full day today, but union officials predicted that most of the district’s 26,000 regular classroom teachers and a substantial number of other support employees will not be there.

Wayne Johnson, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, said Wednesday that most of the union’s 20,000 members and a substantial number of non-members have indicated that they will participate in today’s walkout. At least half of the participants will form picket lines at their schools to protest the failure of current contract talks to produce a satisfactory settlement.

Since June, district and teachers’ negotiators have been trying to agree on a salary increase and other issues. The teachers’ union has been pressing for a 10% to 14% raise, but the most the district has offered is 7%.

The union bargains on behalf of all 26,000 classroom teachers and 6,000 other credentialed employees, such as substitutes, counselors, nurses, librarians and speech and language specialists.

District officials spent much of Wednesday afternoon notifying administrators, substitutes and classroom aides that they will be assigned to schools today to fill in for absent teachers. According to spokesman Bill Rivera, about 1,500 administrators, 3,000 substitutes and 9,400 aides will be asked to serve in classrooms.

Pupil attendance dropped sharply when teachers held a one-day walkout in 1983, and district officials expect a higher-than-normal number of absences today. Buses will operate as usual and cafeterias will be fully staffed, Rivera said.

“We’re prepared to cope with whatever happens,” he said.

Union President Johnson said at a press conference outside the district’s business offices downtown that the walkout today is regrettable but necessary in order to show the administration “what kind of muscle we have . . . what we’re capable of doing” should the union decide to call a strike. He said union officials may schedule other walkouts and ask for a strike vote sometime in the next several weeks if no progress is made in negotiations. “Teachers will vote for a strike if they don’t get 10%,” he said.

The job action scheduled for today is technically not a strike. A public employee union cannot legally strike until mediation efforts have failed and a state-appointed fact-finding panel has reviewed the dispute. Teachers who miss work in the walkout will be docked a day’s pay if they do not produce a valid excuse, such as illness.

The district has maintained that it cannot offer more money because the budget is too tight. The union has argued that extra funds are available, particularly in accounts set aside for school construction.

Johnson said Wednesday that recent allegations by the district attorney’s office that the school district has poor auditing controls--an allusion to a continuing investigation into the alleged theft of thousands of dollars in district money and equipment by a ring of employees--suggest that the district has money but does not know what happened to it. “There is waste . . . and it is due to their own fault.”

The teachers are working under a contract that runs until 1988 but allows renegotiation each year for pay and other benefits. The bargaining teams met twice this week and are scheduled to resume negotiations on Tuesday.