Parents Join in Proposal : Role Sought for Students in Teacher Contract Talks

Students and parents from nine San Fernando Valley schools proposed Sunday that high school student leaders sit in on contract negotiations between the Los Angeles Unified School District and its teachers. The student-parent group, frustrated at the drawn-out negotiations, also suggested that board members bargain face to face with the teachers union.

“Having senior students sitting in will be a calming influence on the thousands of kids” who have picketed and stayed out of classes, said parent Barry Pollack. He referred to protests last week at a dozen high schools and three junior high schools in the city.

In addition, the students’ “mere presence will temper heated rhetoric and encourage honesty and compromise” between the two sides, he said.

Pollack said that a letter with the recommendations, signed by himself and Todd Cobin, the board’s student representative, will be delivered today to Supt. Leonard Britton, to Wayne Johnson, president of the United Teachers-Los Angeles, and to board members. Pollack is running against school board President Roberta Weintraub.

Student Opinions

Students should not only attend the negotiations but should also give their opinions, said Cobin, who is student body president of Birmingham High School. The students are not outsiders but rather “the keynote, the backbone of the whole thing,” he said. “The board and the teachers are supposed to be working for the students.”

Sunday’s meeting in Sherman Oaks drew about 35 parents and students, many of whom said the students were being used as pawns in the labor dispute.

The district and teachers union have negotiated for nearly a year. Teachers have threated to withhold grades from the district, but they said that they would give the fall term grades, due Friday, to students on unofficial report cards.

Many students said they support teachers’ demands for higher pay. And seniors, in particular, said that they want their official grades filed with the district because they need them for college admissions. Cobin called the situation “academic child abuse.”

To pressure the district, several students last week skipped homeroom, where attendance is taken, because the district loses $15 a day in state aid for each student absent.

Pollack, who has three children in public schools, said he drafted the letter because “something’s the matter when it takes 1,000 students walking out” to call attention to a dispute. He said he had not been able to go to an open house in more than a year because of the teachers’ boycott of parent conferences.

Amanda Walzer, a junior at Grant High School, said a student presence would help ensure that the negotiating “is operating and reaching a quick compromise.” She said she boycotted homeroom last week because “our teachers are worth more than they’re getting.”

Parents agreed that teachers are underpaid. “We’ve got to pay them like the professionals they are,” said Philip Reeder, who has two children at Sherman Oaks Elementary School.

The letter, he said, might “shake the board up a little bit.” He said that he supported the students’ protest because “I come from the ‘60s” and because the protest was “really thought out, peaceful, controlled and the issue is of vital importance.”