Teachers Picket Two Santa Ana Schools : Marchers Upset by 5% Bonus in Tentative Contract Settlement

Teachers in at least two Santa Ana schools picketed Friday to protest a 5% salary bonus included in a tentative contract settlement reached by the school district and the teachers union.

Some teachers said they are working to defeat the contract proposal when it goes before union members for a vote Tuesday. The Santa Ana Unified School District Board of Trustees is also scheduled to vote on the proposal Tuesday.

According to the agreement reached during a special negotiating session late Thursday, employees will receive a 5% bonus for the 1987-88 school year. According to Bill Ribblett, president of the Santa Ana Educators Assn., the increase is a one-time-only bonus that will not be included in the teachers’ salary schedule.

7% Pay Increase

For the 1988-89 school year, teachers will receive a 7% pay increase that will form the basis of a new salary schedule, Ribblett said.

The raise, Ribblett said, amounts to a 7% increase over a two-year period.

“We’re just glad to get it settled. It’s not a good settlement,” Ribblett said. “It’s nothing you can write home about. Santa Ana teachers are the lowest paid in the county. They won’t move from that point, but at this point, it was the best settlement we could have gotten.

“A lot of teachers are unhappy with the low salary amount,” he said.

Diane Thomas, spokeswoman for the school district, denied that Santa Ana teachers are the lowest paid in the county. She said the average salary in the district is about $31,000 a year. She said salaries range from $20,000 a year to $42,000 a year.

New Teachers

“It’s a little lower than some districts because we are such a quickly growing district, so for the most part, we are hiring new teachers. They come in at the lower end of the salary schedule and that does things to the average,” she said.

Jane Weinell, a teacher at Carr Intermediate School, said about 25 teachers picketed for 30 minutes in front of the school Friday morning. She said they were upset over newspaper reports implying that the 5% raise would be added to the salary schedule.

“We are very disappointed with the contract. I feel that wasn’t (the) package we were told we would be offered. We are doing everything we can not to ratify it,” she said.

“It’s a buy off, that’s what it is. The district is trying to buy us off and, in the long run, we won’t get our step increase. It comes down to 3.5% this year and 3.5% last year.”

Nick Lima, a teacher at Santa Ana Unified’s Valley High School, said about 65 teachers and 150 students picketed for about 30 minutes Friday at his school.

“We are still protesting the negotiations that were going on over the contract,” Lima said. “The issue has not been solved. All we have is an agreement that will be presented to the teachers supposedly on Tuesday for their ratification. It was a mistake by the negotiators to claim there was an agreement. We’ve had some deception . . . by both parties in notifying the teachers,” he added.

Lima said representatives of teachers from each school in the district will meet at Valley High on Monday to go over details of the proposed agreement.

The teachers union, which originally asked for a 9% pay raise this year, had said it would settle for a 6% raise this year, coupled with a 6.5% raise next year. The school district’s last publicly announced offer to the teachers was a 3% pay raise and a 2% one-time-only payment for the current school year. The school district’s offer did not include any pay proposal for the 1988-89 school year.

Renegotiation Allowed

Under the tentative settlement, the salary can be renegotiated for the third year of the three-year contract along with two articles of either party’s choice, Ribblett said.

The settlement also requires the district to maintain the current level of employee benefits without added cost to employees, and to provide step increases retroactive to July 1, 1987, Thomas said. Coaches, bilingual teachers and other specialists will receive stipend increases beginning July 1, 1988. And members of the teachers union will hold an election before May 18 to decide whether to charge an agency fee to new teachers who do not join the union.

Santa Ana teachers have been working without a contract for nine months.

But school district officials were generally pleased with the tentative settlement.

“My belief is that we have made a really strong offer and I think both the educators association team and our team have worked hard to craft an agreement,” said Robert Richardson, president of the school board.

“What you are seeing from the offer we made was the beginning of an effort to turn the district in a new direction,” he said. “We want to move to a situation where we no longer are balancing our budget on the backs of our employees.”