Teachers, Anaheim District Report a Tentative Settlement

Anaheim Union High School District on Friday reached a tentative settlement in its bitter, 10-month contract dispute with district teachers. But the amount of salary increases hinges on the outcome of political battles in Sacramento to divvy up a recently disclosed $2.5-billion state budget surplus.

The tentative settlement--which still must be ratified by teachers and approved by the board--calls for about a 1% salary increase this year and a guaranteed increase of at least 3.2% for 1989-90.

But because school districts across the state won’t know for a few weeks how much they will get from the state budget surplus, the tentative settlement calls for both sides in the Anaheim dispute to meet in July and again in September to discuss whether teachers will receive a larger pay raise for either year.

“This is a contract settlement on the installment plan,” said Leonard Lahtinen, president of the Anaheim Teachers Assn., adding: “Yes, it is unusual.”

But Lahtinen said the union would recommend that its members ratify the settlement.

The tentative agreement caps an acrimonious contract dispute that culminated in a 1-day teacher strike May 10--the first ever in the history of the 90-year-old-plus school district. During the labor action, almost 700 of the district’s 900 teachers stayed out of their classrooms.

After meeting in negotiations all morning Friday, school board members, district officials and union representatives said they were relieved to finally be near agreement, 10 months after the last contract expired.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a year like this in the history of this district,” Lahtinen said after the final bargaining session. “It’s been a very difficult year.”

The issue had been money. District officials have maintained that declining enrollment since 1972 has badly eroded the district’s treasury. Teachers insisted that they were not asking for much.

The turning point in the talks, according to board president JoAnne Barnett, was the surprise announcement of the state budget surplus.

“I am very pleased that we’ve finally reached this stage,” she said. “It was a money issue. The district just didn’t have it.”

The sprawling school district, with an enrollment of more than 20,000 students, includes intermediate and secondary schools in most of Anaheim, as well as in La Palma and Cypress.

Barnett and Assistant Supt. LeRoy Kellogg said the district was able to come to an agreement with the teachers only after receiving enough assurances from local legislators that the district would not be forgotten when the surplus money was doled out.

“We have been living in our legislators’ offices,” Barnett said. “We just kind of took turns. We would say, ‘You go to this one, and I’ll go to this other one.’

“We wanted to let them (legislators) know that it was important, not just to us, but to everybody in Orange County,” she said.

District officials said they followed the example of Los Angeles Unified School District officials during that district’s teachers’ strike last month. Los Angeles school officials traveled to Sacramento shortly after the surplus was disclosed to buttonhole legislators for some of the extra revenue.

A settlement ending the Los Angeles teachers’ strike came only after those visits.

“When (Los Angeles) administrators went to Sacramento and then settled, we thought they must have gotten some kind of inside information that we weren’t privy to. So it was difficult,” Barnett said. “Now, it’s still an iffy process, but we feel real sure that we will get a fair share.”

The settlement reached Friday is not far from what the teachers had been asking. For the current school year, they had demanded 41% of the budget surplus after a 2.5% reserve had been set aside. And that is what they will get. Lahtinen said this could mean a 1% retroactive raise for teachers. And if the state surplus results in more money for schools in the current budget year, it could mean up to a 5% raise, according to terms in the tentative agreement.

In the second year of the contract, teachers had demanded a 3.2% increase, plus 41% of a budget surplus after reserve funds were set aside. They will get the 3.2%, with an additional promise of up to 8% should the district receive more money from the state.

The settlement also calls for improved retirement benefits. The district is offering full payment of medical benefits to teachers who are 60 to 65 years old. Currently, retired teachers pay about $2,000 a year in medical benefits, Lahtinen said, and he and district officials believe that this new benefit will prompt more of the higher-paid teachers to retire earlier.

Assemblywoman Doris Allen (R-Cypress), a member of a negotiating team appointed by the Assembly Speaker to reach a compromise on the surplus funding for education, said she has kept superintendents in her district informed of the progress of budget talks.

But Allen said she has warned them of one reality: that promises made to Los Angeles teachers and administrators by their legislators has stiffened the competition for education dollars among other smaller school districts in the state.

“Look at what teachers in my district are settling for--a 1% raise one year, and 3.2% the next year. And you look at teachers in Los Angeles settling for 24% over 3 years,” Allen said.

“You have to say, where do they plan to get the money? Well, they plan to get it out of this same pot. And that’s grossly unfair.”