Lack of Signatures Kills Effort to Recall Orange School Board

A recall effort aimed at all seven school board members in the Orange Unified School District officially died at 5 p.m. Wednesday for lack of signatures.

The move to force a special election to oust the board was announced last August by some residents in the district. The recall leaders said they were unhappy about the board’s “unfair” dealing with teachers during their strike in Orange Unified last spring.

Wednesday was the deadline, under state law, for recall workers to file at least 12,306 signatures of registered voters on each petition. Seven separate recall petitions were needed, one for each board member.

None of the petitions was filed, said Beverly Warner, a supervisor for the Orange County registrar of voters.

Howard Chassagne, a recall leader, had said the goal was to seat an entirely new board in the 24,500-student school district.

In an interview Wednesday night, Chassagne said the recall effort failed solely for lack of enough volunteers to solicit voter signatures. “The people in the community were anxious to sign the recall petitions,” he said. “We just didn’t have enough people to take the petitions around. We had about 6,000 signatures (on each petition) when we stopped around the Christmas holidays.”

Chassagne and other recall workers had criticized the board for its treatment of teachers, who went on strike in May after 15 months of deadlocked negotiations for a pay raise. The 7-day strike ended with a new contract for the teachers that included a one-time 3% pay raise for the 1987-88 school year and a 6.3% pay increase for the 1988-89 school year.

Despite the settlement, some bitter feelings remained from the strike, several teachers said. And on Wednesday the Orange Unified school board president, Sandy Englander, said the recall move stemmed from the teacher strike.

“Most of the people involved in the recall effort were teachers, but the information we had was that it was a small group--about 20 or so at their meetings,” Englander said.