Santa Ana Teachers Delay Vote on Ratification

Members of the Santa Ana Unified School District teachers union Tuesday delayed a ratification vote on a proposed three-year contract until Friday and Monday and agreed to allow non-members to vote on the pact as well.

Several teachers stood outside Valley High School’s auditorium before the 3 p.m. meeting and handed out flyers asking that the vote be delayed to allow more time to study the contract.

“We have not seen the contract at all,” said Pat Murtland, who is not a union member and who teaches government at Valley High School, “and we don’t want to set a precedent for bonuses.”

Murtland was referring to a one-time, 5% bonus this year that is part of the proposed contract. Teachers would receive a 7% salary increase in the 1988-89 school year, and negotiations would be reopened for 1989-90.

The Santa Ana Board of Education, meanwhile, ratified the agreement with the teachers’ association Tuesday night, subject to the teachers’ ratification, by a 3-2 vote, board spokeswoman Diane Thomas said.

Santa Ana teachers, whose pay ranges from $20,670 to $41,383, have been without a contract since July 1. The union--the Santa Ana Educators Assn.--authorized a strike May 22 but has set no date for a walkout. There was no discussion Tuesday of a possible strike in the event that the contract is not ratified.

A tentative agreement between the school board and union negotiators was reached Thursday. But many teachers became angry at both the union leadership and the school board for not making all terms of the contract clear when they were first presented to the membership Friday.

In particular, teachers were upset that they were not told that the additional 5% they would earn this year would be a one-time bonus and would not become part of their salary structure. About 75 teachers who picketed in front of Saddleback High School on Sunday said that leaving that information out of announcements sent Friday amounted to a deception.

Union and school district officials said the omission was an oversight.

Gail King-Burney, president of the union, asked at the start of the meeting that the members vote to delay ratification, which they did overwhelmingly.

“We’re not trying to ram this down your throat,” King-Burney said. “We want you to have the opportunity to have your concerns addressed.”

The secret-ballot ratification vote will be held at district schools on Friday and Monday.

The union members voted to open the balloting to teachers who are not union members only after spirited debate. Several union members argued that their yearly union dues--about $450--pay for the administrators and negotiators who won concessions from the school board and that voting on the contract was one of the few privileges they, and not non-members, enjoyed.

“I have been a paying member for 15 years,” said Lorna Karmazov, a teacher at Jackson Elementary School. “I very much resent this vote being opened to people who over the years have given me all kinds of reasons for not giving that $200, $300 or $400 per year. We all have other uses for that money.”

But others, both members and non-members, argued that the contract vote was too important to lock out almost half of the district’s teachers. About 900 of the 1,750 teachers in the district are union members.

“Without the rank and file, those negotiations would have gone on until the year 2000,” said Wylie Carlyle, a union member, history teacher and football and track coach at Santa Ana High School.

“It’s us teachers who got sick (teachers staged two unauthorized sickouts), who got threats from the administration when we came back. We should all vote.”