Education at Standstill on Strike's Second Day : Report of New Contract Proposal Is Disputed; More Upper-Grade Students Desert Campuses

By SAM ENRIQUEZ

May 17, 1989 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writers

With education grinding to a standstill, the Los Angeles Unified School District weathered its second day of a teachers’ strike Tuesday amid rumblings of possible new contract offers but no signs that a settlement was near.

Larger numbers of students, particularly in the upper grades, stayed away from classes Tuesday.

At Franklin High School in Highland Park, about 500 students stormed school gates just before 10 a.m., after administrators attempted to lock them inside the campus. Students had planned a walkout to show their support for striking teachers.

“It was crazy,” said 11th-grader Jeri Naylor. “Everybody was going nuts.”

District officials said that, based on morning attendance reports, about 325,000 students were in school Tuesday, down from the 430,000 recorded Monday. But many school administrators conceded that the number of students who actually stayed in school all day was far lower. The district has 594,000 students.

District sources said the Board of Education was considering a package of proposals from the union, including a new salary proposal. Board member Warren Furutani said that among the “range of discussions” taking place is a contract provision requiring non-union members to pay union dues, or an “agency fee.” The proposals also include a 22.5% pay increase--compared to the earlier district offer of 21.5%--over three years and a contract extending to five years.

A source close to the negotiations said that the agency fee has joined the salary increase as a major stumbling block to settlement of the strike.

But United Teachers-Los Angeles President Wayne Johnson denied that the union had proposed a counter-offer on pay and added that the dues issue is not new. Union spokeswoman Catherine Carey said the agency fee “won’t be an obstacle” to settlement.

After a four-hour closed meeting downtown late Tuesday, school board President Roberta Weintraub said that, short of concessions on the union’s part, the strike was not likely to end before Friday, when the district expects to receive answers on the amount of new state money for next year.

Johnson said he fears that the chances for a quick settlement are fading. “I am much less hopeful today than yesterday,” he said in an interview at union eadquarters near downtown. He said he had not had contact with any school board member since a telephone conversation with board member Jackie Goldberg on Monday night.

He declined to give specifics of his talks with Goldberg, but said the union continues to be interested in a contract that would offer teachers a 10% retroactive pay raise this year, between 5.5% and 9% in 1990 and 8% in 1991.

Gov. George Deukmejian is expected to release the revised state budget as early as Thursday, which officials on both sides hope will provide some answers to questions about the amount of extra money the district can expect this year. The district’s latest offer provides that teachers would receive a maximum of an 8% raise in 1990 if new state money becomes available. The district’s three-year offer currently proposes 8% retroactive to last July, 5.5% in 1990 and 8% in 1991.

Expected today is a report from a state fact-finder who has been reviewing district finances and weighing them against union demands. But neither side in the labor dispute is required to abide by the fact-finder’s report.

Meanwhile, the state Court of Appeal has not made a decision on the union’s request Monday for an emergency injunction to stop Supt. Leonard Britton’s order that teachers hand in grade books or face withholding of pay.

At the schools Tuesday, the scene was much the same as Monday, with classes doubled and tripled-up to make the best use of limited staffing. On most campuses, skeleton staffs relied on television, movies and games to help pass the time. The operative word--at least among students--was “boring.”

“We just sat around,” Wilson Chu, 12, a student at Castelar Street Elementary School in Chinatown, said just before sitting down to a screening of an educational film titled “Boy With Glasses.” “We didn’t have a teacher. The teacher was next door.”

Before classes began, teachers stopped by the school office to pick up materials, which included handouts with activities such as “Name as many kinds of windstorms as you can,” “Make up three names for rock groups” and “Name as many breeds of dogs as you can.”

“This is not productive,” said Principal William Chun Hoon. “Everyone knows that. This is not education. We say we are doing what we should be doing, but it’s not the same.”

At Walter Reed Junior High School in North Hollywood, ninth-grader Allan Reiss said Tuesday morning: “I came back to see if there were any parties. . . . There’s nothing to do here but watch TV.”

At Carpenter Avenue School in Studio City, second-grader Ronnie Williams, said, “We played kick ball. Then we got to do some work. Then we got lunch. Then we got to see half of ‘ET.’ ”

Calm at Eagle Rock

At Eagle Rock Junior-Senior High School, where only about 700 of the 2,100 students were present Tuesday, the mood was eerily calm.

Groups of boys were seen leaping over high fences onto Yosemite Drive while others simply strolled out the front gate on La Roda Avenue.

“We were here yesterday and we wanted to see if it was any different,” said Joey Hamori, a senior, who was leaving the school with three friends after the first period. “It’s not really worth it.”

The biggest disturbance was at Franklin High. Angelina Barriga, an 11th-grader, said students got out by jumping fences, breaking through gates and rushing past school police officers. Some left through unlocked rear exits.

Principal Ed Rosas said the doors were locked to protect the students.

“We wanted to make sure students didn’t get hurt,” he said. “We wanted nothing to get out of hand.”

Only 100 of Franklin’s 2,400 students remained on campus after Tuesday’s walkout, Rosas said.

Police were called to the scene after reports that the students were blocking traffic, but a spokesman for the LAPD’s Northeast Division said there were no injuries or arrests.

Merchants and security directors at shopping malls reported seeing more students than usual during school hours.

“We’re definitely seeing an influx of juveniles,” said Terry DeNiro, assistant security director at the Beverly Center in West Los Angeles. Normally the shopping center tries to enforce a policy of keeping school-age youths out of the mall during school hours, “but with the strike going on,” he said, “that’s something we decided we’re not going to bother with.”

At the Eagle Rock Plaza, however, some merchants said they were on the alert for shoplifting, because of the increase in young visitors from nearby schools.

“It does create a security problem,” said Jerry Motzel, manager of Karls Toys. “Instead of the schools being the baby-sitter, the malls and other entertainments are the baby-sitters today.”

Meanwhile, district and union officials issued conflicting reports on how many teachers remained on strike Tuesday. Johnson said 23,000 of the district’s 32,000 teachers, counselors, nurses and librarians were honoring the picket lines, although he predicted that there would be some attrition by the end of the week.

The district said about 11,250 regular teachers came to work, 1,000 more than on Monday. Those figures do not include the 2,400 administrators and substitutes who were in the classrooms both days.

The district said teachers were “trickling back” into schools in three regions--the south San Fernando Valley, the Eastside and Central Los Angeles. District spokeswoman Diana Munatones said between one and seven teachers per school, who had not been in class Monday, reported to work Tuesday.

Sees It From Two Sides

But that did not include economics teacher Chuck Payne, who was on the picket line Tuesday at North Hollywood High School. Payne said he views the contract dispute from a unique vantage point: He also serves as president of the Newhall Elementary School District Board of Education.

“I was really undecided for a while, because I was on the other side, as a board member,” Payne said.

But he said he changed his mind after Britton ordered teachers to submit final grade records early to circumvent the union’s original plan to begin a strike May 30.

About 400 substitutes recruited last weekend were staffing classrooms, Munatones said. Another 400 have been hired but will not be assigned to schools until the district receives confirmation that they have passed health tests.

The district also reported that fewer than one-third of high school teachers and less than half of elementary and junior high instructors turned in grade roll books, which were due Monday.

Associate Supt. Gabriel Cortina acknowledged Tuesday that it will be “very, very difficult” to provide final grades for the district’s students by June 23, when the school year is set to end.

“It’s definitely going to cause problems for this district and the students if the substitutes have to diagnose where the students are without the roll books,” he said. “It means that we will have to make every effort to piece together the work students have done already.”

The seven-member school board remains divided over contract issues, chiefly over money. Only three members--Goldberg, Furutani and Julie Korenstein--are willing to raise the district’s last salary offer of a 21.5% raise over three years. District officials say $120 million in cuts over two years would be needed to finance the 21.5% offer, and Weintraub, Rita Walters and Alan Gershman are unwilling to make deeper spending cuts to pay for a higher salary raise.

“I will confirm that one of the major items remains the money and with the focus being on UTLA’s attempt to convince the district that it should risk further cuts by promising money before it’s here,” said district negotiator Dick Fisher. “At the same time, UTLA is unwilling to take a chance itself . . . They don’t lose anything if (the extra money) doesn’t come in. We’ve really been hoping they would think that through.”

Also contributing to this article were Times staff writers Larry Gordon, John Mitchell and Elizabeth J. Mann.