Amnesty Issue Knots Orange School Talks

Negotiators, still meeting during another marathon arbitration session, continued deadlocked late Sunday on any agreement to settle the 10-day teacher strike against the Orange Unified School District.

Spokesmen for both sides confirmed that only agreement on a general amnesty clause was preventing them from reaching an accord with the district’s 1,100 teachers.

Many of the district’s teachers were called to an Anaheim hotel Sunday night to get an update on the talks. But they were ordered home two hours later after Mark Rona, president of the Orange Unified Education Assn., told them behind closed doors that no agreement had been reached.

Rona advised the teachers to wait at home for further instructions. At about 9:30 p.m. he returned to a hotel in Orange to continue the negotiations, which had begun at 8 a.m. Sunday.

The union president said the school district’s negotiators would not give in to a general amnesty demanded by striking teachers.

“These people do not want to go back to school without a no-reprisal clause,” Rona said after meeting with the teachers.

School board president Russell Barrios, who was at the negotiating table Sunday night, said the board was not interested in “any witch hunt” against striking teachers.

“The only thing the board is concerned about is those things that might jeopardized the students. We have a duty to respond to those kinds of complaints (by parents),” Barrios said.

William G. Steiner, another member of the district’s board of trustees, agreed with Barrios.

“As a parent, I am not interested in reprisals. Both the striking and nonstriking teachers of my children behaved professionally and did nothing to harm my children during this ordeal,” Steiner said.

“As a school board member, I’m not interested in reprisals. In fact, I will devote my energies to get people to work together and put any bitterness behind us.”

Steiner also said he did not “know why the union wouldn’t accept” the investigation of complaints lodged against individual teachers.

“Parents’ complaints have to be responded to,” regardless of how the union and the school board decide the amnesty issue, he said.

Adele Graves, a parent of an El Modena High School student, said she had organized other parents to file complaints with the school district for any illegal acts individual teachers might have committed during the strike.

She said those complaints would be filed today, regardless of talks between the school district and the teacher union.

“We don’t want these teachers to have a clean slate of amnesty,” she said. “They should be accountable.”

The district’s teachers have been involved in a 15-month deadlock over a new pay raise and benefits. The district, the third-largest in the county with 24,500 students, includes all of Orange and Villa Park, plus parts of Garden Grove, Santa Ana & Anaheim.

The district’s last offer was for a 2.54% one-time-only bonus for teacher pay for the current year. The union’s last proposal was for a 3% regular pay raise retroactive to July 1. Unlike a bonus, a regular pay raise becomes part of the base salary to which future increases are added.