Dual Role Creates ‘Difficult Situation’ : Board Member Backs Strike

In the teeming room where the Santa Ana teachers were meeting to take a strike vote, Gloria Tuchman was just a face in the crowd of 700.

But when a reporter recognized her, she smiled and said, “This is a difficult situation for me. Some of my colleagues on the school board asked me, ‘You’re not really going to that meeting?’

“But I’m a teacher. So I’m here.”

Tuchman is both a teacher and a school board member. She has been a teacher 23 years and currently teaches first grade at Taft Elementary in Santa Ana Unified. A Tustin resident, she has been on the Tustin school board since November, 1985, when she was elected in the wake of a bitter, six-day teacher strike in that district.

Pay Increases at Issue

School boards and teachers often have disputes, but the most heated involve pay issues in unresolved contracts. And it was anger over the unresolved pay-hike contract for Santa Ana Unified’s 1,750 teachers that provoked their strike-authorization vote on Tuesday.

Tuchman was among the last to cast her secret ballot at that meeting. “I really stayed quite a long time before I voted,” she said in an interview Wednesday. “I really was in shock.”

In the end, Tuchman said, she voted in favor of authorizing a strike. “I’m opposed to strikes,” she added. “But I supported my colleagues. I voted as Gloria Tuchman, teacher.”

Still, she acknowledged, the side of her that is Gloria Tuchman, school board member, recognizes that the root problem is bigger than one school district.

“This all goes back to (mishandling by) Sacramento,” she said. “It’s clear that education is not a priority in Sacramento. We’ve got to start alerting the public.”

Tuchman said she hopes the vote for a strike authorization will make the public aware that state funding for the schools is inadequate. The school districts cannot give adequate pay to teachers, she said, unless the state provides the money. “The fact that so many school districts still have unsettled contracts with teachers this year should tell the state something,” she said.

But Tuchman charged that Santa Ana Unified’s five-member school board nonetheless deserves criticism for its handling of teacher-contract negotiations. “When I walked into that meeting room on Tuesday, I noticed how much animosity the teachers had,” she said. “I think it’s a lack of communication.”

Tuchman and her husband have two sons: one is a freshman at UC Santa Barbara and another is in the eighth grade in Tustin. She was swept to election on the Tustin Unified school board a month after the bitter strike by teachers there. The Tustin teachers’ union had targeted two incumbents, Dorothy T. Ralston and Dr. Edward H. Boseker, for defeat. The union threw its support to Tuchman and Jane Bauer, an attorney, and both won.

Appointment to National Council

Tuchman, a Latino, subsequently became active in a statewide movement to end California’s bilingual-education law. She and other critics said the law was too rigid. They were successful in getting Gov. George Deukmejian to veto a bill that would have continued the state law, and the old bilingual-education measure ended last June 30.

In November, 1987, U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett, who is also a critic of some bilingual-education programs, appointed Tuchman to the National Advisory Council for Bilingual Education.

While it was a strike that propelled Tuchman to an election victory three years ago, Tuchman said Wednesday that she still dislikes teacher strikes. “I hope a strike can still be averted in Santa Ana,” she added.

But if the teachers in Santa Ana do walk out, Tuchman said she would join them. “I will support my colleagues.”