School Board Lambasted : Orange Teachers Return to Picket Lines

Angry threats of political action against the school board reverberated Wednesday as teachers in Orange Unified School District once again hit the picket lines in frustration over their 15-month contract dispute. No negotiations are planned.

Teachers union officials said the strike will continue indefinitely until a favorable pay-raise settlement is reached.

“This is a ridiculous strike,” Bill Honig, state superintendent of public instruction, said in Sacramento. “Both sides are so close that this should be settled.”

But school district administrators said Wednesday that there simply is no more money available to meet the teachers’ demands.

“If there had been a way to resolve it (Tuesday) night, we would have resolved it,” said Jack Elsner, personnel services administrator for the school district. Elsner said that although Orange Unified only received 2.54% in new funds from the state this year, the school district is offering a total compensation package, including fringe benefits, of a 4.64% pay raise. He said the district could not offer more to the teachers.

“Out of frustration I must say that no matter what we do for the teachers, it never seems to be enough,” Board of Education member William Steiner said.

The school district this year has offered the teachers a 2.54% one-time-only pay bonus. Negotiators for the Orange Unified Education Assn. on Tuesday night lowered their demand from a 3.45% to a 3% pay increase--not a one-time bonus--for the current year. The two sides could not reach agreement, and state mediator Draza Mrvichin broke off the talks at 11:15 p.m. Tuesday.

Mrvichin said he would call both sides back when he thought progress could be made. He scheduled no talks as of Wednesday, however, and the union vowed to continue the strike.

“I know we’re going to lose some more teachers (from the picket line) on Thursday,” said Mark Rona, president of the union. “A lot of these teachers are suffering financially.” Rona, however, said the teachers, overall, still overwhelmingly support the strike and are “very angry” at the school board.

Administrators reported that 589 of the 1,100 teachers in the school district were absent Wednesday, compared to 561 on Monday, 651 Friday and 565 last Thursday, when the “rolling,” or continuous, strike began. The teachers in April had staged a one-day strike, followed by two massive sickouts.

About 800 parents and striking teachers gathered Wednesday morning in front of school district headquarters in Orange for a rally and to hear a fiery speech by Rona.

“What the district has done is make us so angry that we are more united than ever,” said Rona, who was interrupted by several enthusiastic ovations from the crowd.

Board Members Targeted

“We have to go out and make certain that no school board member currently sitting on the board is ever reelected,” Rona added. “They are our target. We can’t afford the luxury of having them sit on the school board any more.”

Many of the teachers at the rally accused the board of mismanagement and called on school board members to resign.

“If the school district would come out and say, ‘We have been capricious in the way we spend our money, and we accept responsibility for the lack of funds that we have,’ I’ll go without a pay raise,” said Don Alger, a ninth-grade teacher at Villa Park High.

Another teacher said, “We would go back right now, without one penny of a raise, if the board would resign.”

Other teachers at the rally called for recall action against all seven members of the school board. Lidia Broncolino, a teacher at Jordan Elementary School, said teachers “might have to go into a long-term fight (and will) probably have to work on a recall. There’s no more room for discussion.”

District Responds

But Jack Elsner, personnel administrator for the school district, said a recall would not solve the contract dispute.

“I don’t know what purpose that’s going to serve,” Elsner said. “If the board had more money they would have given it to them already. The board, I think, has gone out of its way to solve this thing. We’ve come up with an additional $500,000 in the past week or two. . . . We can’t bankrupt this school district. It’s not that we don’t want to give them more money. The issue is not between us and them. The issue is between education and Sacramento.”

Honig, who has frequently battled for state education money from Sacramento, said Wednesday that the school board is right to worry about the state budget next year.

Gov. George Deukmejian earlier this year said education would get a 4.1% increase in money in 1988-89, compared to 2.54% for the current school year. But since Deukmejian’s original forecast, state income this year has plummeted. State officials on Tuesday predicted as much as a $2-billion shortfall.

Orange Unified district negotiators are seeking to hedge against a shrinking state budget for the second year of the contract by requiring the teachers union to agree to “contingency” language in the new contract. The contingency would be that some of the proposed 6.3% average pay raise proposed for the teachers in 1988-89 would be cut back if the state money is less than Deukmejian’s 4.1% original forecast.

Rona has repeatedly denounced the contingency proposal and said the union will not agree to it. “What that would do is possibly take away any pay raise for next year,” he said.

On Wednesday night, union and school district officials spoke at separate parent meetings about their respective money concerns. Union president Rona spoke to about 200 parents outdoors at El Modena Park in Orange. Parents moved to the park after El Modena High School officials refused to allow them to meet on the school grounds.

“We’re on strike because we’ve been negotiating with the district for 15 months and have been unable to reach agreement,” Rona said. “The district says they don’t have the money, and we say if they re-prioritize, they do have the money.”