Local News in Brief : Laguna Beach : Teachers Demonstrate Over Pay Raise Offer

Upset about a proposed 3% pay raise when their union is demanding 13%, teachers in Laguna Beach Unified School District demonstrated outside a school board meeting Tuesday night.

Lois Rake, president of Laguna Beach Unified Faculty Assn., said the teachers no longer believe the district’s claim that it has money problems and cannot offer higher than a 3% pay raise. “They are like the little boy who yelled ‘wolf’ too many times,” Rake said.

“The district said last year it only had money for a 3.5% pay raise for the teachers, and we accepted that. But the thing that hurt was that the district then gave about a 12% pay raise to the superintendent and the business manager.”

Jack Parham, an Irvine lawyer hired by the district to negotiate with the teachers, said Tuesday that the two administrators received bigger raises because “they were the lowest-paid (unified school district) administrators in the county.”

Rake said teachers believe that the school district “means something else when they say money is not available. . . . What they’re saying is that they have another priority for the money.”

Of the district’s 93 teachers, the lowest-paid earn $22,487 a year, the highest $43,112, Parham said.