Around the Valley : Moods on Campuses Run Gamut as Teachers Set Up Picket Lines

Teachers were walking out of class Monday across the San Fernando Valley and students were skipping out.

But Sylmar parent Trudy Brunsell was hurrying to her neighborhood school to see for herself what effect the first Los Angeles teachers strike in 20 years was having on her two young children’s education.

“I need to see what’s going on,” said Brunsell as she pasted a large “visitor” pass to her blouse and walked onto the Harding Street Elementary School campus. “They’ve both been working so hard all year in school I hate to keep them home. But I don’t want to send them here if they’re just going to be baby-sat.”

As Brunsell paused at the school gate, mothers Vernie Orr and Grace Nakamura and their eight children were carrying picket signs. “I think my kids are better off and safer out here behind me than in there,” said Nakamura, the mother of five.

A short time earlier, a crowd of about 1,500 striking teachers gathered for a rally in a North Hollywood park and cheered when teachers union organizers declared that they had successfully closed down Harding Street School.

Two of Harding’s 23 teachers had stayed in class, however. And they were joined by administrators who manned classrooms for the half of the school’s 640 pupils who arrived for class.

Students at Van Nuys Junior High School told picketing teachers that Principal William O’Rear had been pelted with an egg when he assembled a group of pupils in the school auditorium to show them “cartoons and a 1937 Henry Fonda movie,” as history teacher Ken Silverman relayed it.

But O’Rear said the egg, thrown by a student, missed him and hit the stage. And he said no cartoons were shown to the 550 students (out of 880) who showed up for class Monday. “We did show ‘Drums Along the Mohawk,’ ” O’Rear reported. “It fits in our early American history curriculum.”

At San Fernando High, where only 900 of 2,600 registered students showed up for class, there was talk that a non-striker’s car had been vandalized by striking teachers. School officials and police said they had no knowledge of any attack.

But pickets blamed the strikebreaker for an incident that may have led to damage to his car. “We were blocking the driveway when his car rammed me,” said counselor Betty Russie. “He did it on purpose. When another teacher kicked his car, he got out and was ready to fight.”

Striking San Fernando teachers gathered at the driveway Monday afternoon to shout insults and toss pennies at strikebreakers, who were escorted to the street by school police.

“This sort of thing bothers me a lot,” said Principal Bart Kricorian, who watched several of the altercations. “But everyone has to do what he has to do under the circumstances. I hope we can get back together and patch things up when this is over.”

In Van Nuys, officials and parents alike were surprised when Fulton Junior High School strikers handed out flyers asking youngsters to snitch on strikebreakers “for extra credit” by turning in brief essays that included the replacement teachers’ names and duties.

“I think fascism is raising its ugly head,” said parent E.J. Spitz, mother of a ninth-grader. “I’m outraged. This is what Hitler had youths do in Nazi Germany.”

Fulton Principal Mel Mares said he was also disappointed by the tactic. But he said there was nothing that could be done to stop it.

At Reseda’s 500-student Shirley Avenue Elementary School, Principal Rosialeigh Wilson was also disappointed.

She said someone entered her school without permission over the weekend and jammed sticks into the locks of book closets and cabinets. Wilson called police when strikers allegedly appeared during the children’s outdoor lunch hour and disrupted some of the 330 students who showed up for classes, encouraging them to flock to the fence at one side of the schoolyard. The picketers quickly left and no arrests were made.

Most students in the Valley seemed to support the striking teachers.

But San Fernando 11th grader Ricanne Durang, 16, said youngsters took up a $60 collection for one strikebreaker who told students he had crossed the picket line out of desperation “because I have a wife and a baby on the way.” When school administrators admonished the students, “we told them it was a baby shower gift,” Durang said.

Seventh-grader Steve Bonss took the bus to the pinball arcade at the Galleria shopping center in Sherman Oaks the minute he could duck out of classes at Olive Vista Junior High in Sylmar.

“They opened the gate and everybody started to leave and nobody did nothing,” said Bonss, 14. If the strike continues today, he said, he may visit the Panorama Mall in Panorama City.

Some students at North Hollywood High School had a reason to stay in school, however. Striking teacher Gloria Korney accompanied the 20-member Madrigals campus singing group to a performance at the Biltmore Hotel, students said. Korney stayed on the bus when it returned youngsters to the campus, however.

“She said we’d worked too hard not to go to this,” said 11th-grader Adam Grossett, 17.

North Hollywood High Principal Angela Reuser said 1,128 of the school’s 2,123 pupils showed up for class, along with 20 of the school’s 100 teachers. By the day’s end, however, all but 500 of the students had skipped class and left campus.

Students lined up at a pay phone at El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills to call their parents to come pick them up when only 21 of the school’s 117 teachers showed up for classes. About 1,200 of the school’s 2,600 pupils had come to school, but most quickly drifted off when they were told to go sit in assembly halls.

Some hurried to a rally being held by strikers in the driveway of a neighboring home. There, fifteen-year-old 10th-grader Brian Kane blew bubbles: a show of support for striking teachers, he said. Senior Christy Nemetz photographed the scene with a video camera for her TV news production class.

“We hope to broadcast this. But there’s not going to be anybody at school to broadcast the show to,” the 16-year-old lamented.

Striking teachers were taking their own pictures--of strikebreakers, said government teacher Jack Koenig, who is a city councilman in Agoura Hills. “We have pictures of everyone. We aren’t going to call them as preferred subs after this.”

El Camino Principal Martin E. King said students were asked to go to an auditorium “where they’re showing educational films, no bull.” As he watched students walk unchallenged out the school’s front door, King shrugged wearily.

“I’ve had better days,” he confessed.