Strain Shows on First Day Back in School

What happened at Le Conte Junior High School on Friday said it all, for both sides.

“This is a great reconciliation,” exulted Leanna Belson, 46, a math lab teacher who stood in the school foyer laughing and chatting with friends. Doughnuts, cake, coffee and punch had been laid out for them, and returning teachers greeted one another joyously under a festive hand-painted banner reading “Welcome.”

“There are teachers standing here and talking to each other who were both on strike and not on strike,” Belson said. “I think this school will soon feel like a home again.”

Insult Leveled

But moments later, some teachers who had not gone on strike were sitting in the faculty cafeteria, when another teacher returning to work from the picket line walked in and looked around him. “Something,” he said pointedly, “stinks in here.”

Around the nearly 600 schools that make up the Los Angeles Unified School District, unified was just what everyone was hoping to be. Scarcely a day after a contract ratification ended a nine-day strike notable for its withering, often insulting hostility, there was more than just a few days of class work for teachers to make up. There were strained relationships to be resolved too. On Friday, as students and returning teachers cele brated their reunion with hugs and flowers, classes were back on schedule, and striking and non-striking workers were colleagues once again, at least in name.

“It feels nice to be back doing what we do best,” remarked music teacher Sid Lasaine at the Westside’s Hamilton High School. “The kids are happy to see us and we were happy to be here.”

The backwash of the previous nine days lingered: “This morning when I opened the ladies’ room door, I was worried about who I would run into,” said Le Conte English teacher Hildreth Simmons. “You feel the tension in the cafeteria, passing in the hallways. Do you speak or not?”

Of the district’s 26,250 teachers, 24,569 were back at work Friday--but they were teaching only 365,137 students, out of a total of 594,000. District spokesman Shel Erlich attributed the lower-than-normal student attendance to the temptation to make it a four-day holiday weekend, and to some parents’ possible concerns whether this first day back would really be a learning day.

One teacher who asked not to be identified said teachers wanted to go back Friday so they could be paid for the holiday on Monday.

Some came back to work still clad in their strike attire--United Teachers-Los Angeles sweat shirts, T-shirts. Hamilton counselor Ellen Wormser wore her “strike jewelry,” five pro-union buttons. Others marched onto campuses like victorious troops. Fifty teachers at Sepulveda Junior High School in the San Fernando Valley were singing “Solidarity Forever” as they marched in at the 7:30 opening bell.

Campuses were awash Friday with simple relief that the strike was over, and an eagerness to get back to normal prevailed--even among students. With the pending three-day weekend and back-to-class reunions among teachers and their students, a holiday mood bubbled.

“I’m very pleased,” said Venice High School English teacher John Batcho. “I feel a sense of urgency to make up for the missed time.”

Darlene Haezaert, a Venice High health teacher, led her first-period class out to the school parking lot. There, from the trunk of her white Chevy Impala, students retrieved her accumulation of books, loose-leaf papers and notebooks and carried them back to class.

Gwen Murata’s sixth-grade class at Cheremoya Avenue Elementary School welcomed her back with roses and notes. “It’s pretty good to have her back, but I was hoping she would be gone a little longer so we could have a few more days off,” lamented Courtney Salido.

“I missed my children,” said Murata, delighted at their welcome. “I always miss my children.”

For the duration of the strike, students could whine about being bored with substitute teachers and less-than-interesting classes. On Friday they could complain anew about homework and tests.

“I’m glad they’re back, but now I have to lug this heavy backpack around,” moped Le Conte student body President Renee Barrow, 14, her backpack stuffed with books once again.

At Sepulveda Junior High, 583 pupils who had stayed away from school during the strike stood in line to present absence notes to 18 attendance officers--10 more than usual. Some who did not have legitimate signed excuses from their parents forged notes as they stood in line.

“I didn’t have a note when I got here. But I’ve got one now,” grinned ninth-grader Adam Bloom, 14. His note, scrawled on notebook paper, read: “ . . . We didn’t want him to get hurt during the conflicts involving the strike.”

Parents, even more than students, seemed relieved that the strike was over.

Anna Martinez was picking up her 6-year-old son at Rosemont Elementary School in Echo Park on Friday afternoon. “I’m sad because the strike was too long. All the students missed class. My son needs an education,” she said.

Lisa Rosales was “happy” the teachers were back in her daughter’s classes at Chandler Elementary School in Van Nuys. “Now they can have real classes. They missed class and they didn’t learn, but the teachers deserved to go on strike so they could get a raise.”

Although some, like English teacher Cyril Baird at Mark Twain Junior High School in West Los Angeles, plunged right back into the curriculum--with a pop quiz--for others, the strike atmosphere lingered in the classroom.

English teacher Simmons’ first lesson to her students was to define strike terms from a newspaper editorial--including the word scab.

“They wanted to know how I felt about the strike. It’s important that they understand what this was about,” she said.

In Helaine Gilbert’s English class at Hamilton High, they talked about how difficult it is to make a living on around $23,000 a year, the starting salary before the new contract.

“At least one of my students said he didn’t want to be a teacher,” Gilbert said, “because he could make more money selling drugs.”

For some students, the deeper lessons of the strike remain unsettled--and unsettling.

At Le Conte, Barrow, who had been angry that teachers had risked her ninth-grade graduation by striking, was even more perplexed to see teachers who had been on opposite sides talking and joking together Friday. “I never knew anybody could be so two-faced,” she said disgustedly.

However upbeat the surface mood was in some places Friday, beneath the cheer was evidence that the rifts between teacher and teacher will take a long time to heal. After days of directing their wrath at administrators and the school board, many of those who struck refocused their contempt on those who had remained in classes.

At El Camino Real High in Woodland Hills, teachers were applauded when they walked en masse Friday morning onto the campus where about 20 of their colleagues had refused to strike. Math teacher Art Kohn acknowledged, “It won’t be normal for a while. I think it was very short-sighted of the young teachers who didn’t support us.”

“We have to pick up and go on from here,” Le Conte Principal David Sowers said. “This is a tough time to be keeping everybody together and to keep your spirits high. But things look better down the road.”

The road looked like it could be a long one.

The lines were clearly drawn in the teachers’ cafeteria at Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High School, much as they were at faculty rooms citywide. Once-striking teachers sat at one table, non-strikers at another. In their mailboxes, some Emerson teachers who had not gone on strike found letters: “What a scab,” is all the missives said.

One Le Conte teacher suggested the school supply boxing gloves in the faculty cafeteria so teachers could “duke it out.”

Although some teachers say they will put the strike behind them and resume old friendships, for some it will be difficult. “In the long run we may be able to work together on a professional level, but those I previously considered friends, who stayed inside, I can no longer think of in the same way,” said Steve Bourgouin, a union leader at Le Conte.

John Morrison, a physical education teacher and the union representative at Emerson, said, “Some of them (non-strikers) have the gall to come up to me and say, ‘Hi, how are you doing.’ I’m not ready to get that comfortable right now.”

At Hamilton, Wormser, a veteran of the last strike in 1970, said there is still “a lot of bitterness” about those who stayed in classes.

“It is grossly unfair that they are going to get the same thing that we fought so hard and struck for. It is like a cold breeze in the middle of this sunshining day, but it is good to be back,” Wormser said.

Trying to be conciliatory, Barbara Hertz, an eighth-grade science teacher at Emerson, sat down with the small group of teachers who had worked during the dispute even though she had been on strike.

But “when I sat down here, two teachers just got up and left,” Hertz said. “They said, ‘You have a lot of nerve sitting here at this table.’ ”

The teachers who crossed the picket line had their own criticisms of their striking colleagues.

Nestor Wasylyn, an industrial arts teacher at Emerson who worked during the strike, said he is still bitter about name-calling and ethnic and racial remarks made by pickets.

“I respected their rights to be on strike, but they didn’t seem to want to respect our decision not to,” he said.

At Le Conte, Andi Leibsohn, who walked the picket line while her best friend at the school continued teaching, said her feelings toward her friend remain intact. Her feelings toward other teachers have not changed either, she added.

“I have to trust that each person crossed for some reason of their own and I have to respect them for it,” she said. “There is so much that needs to happen at this school. I just hope that the anger doesn’t get in the way.”

Times staff writers Elizabeth J. Mann, John Mitchell and Bob Pool contributed to this article.