L.A. School Principals Feel ‘Abused,’ May Form Union

Ask any principal in the Los Angeles Unified School District what the past year was like, and the response is likely to be the same: It was a very rough year.

Principals were reviled by the teachers’ union, were asked by upper management to carry out unpopular actions and struggled through a nine-day teachers’ strike that reduced most schools to baby-sitting operations. To make matters worse, the principals say, they were threatened with pay cuts.

“We feel abused,” said the principal of a large elementary school near downtown. “We’re facing teachers with a strong union and we’re not well represented ourselves. We’re not in control. We feel left out.”

So, it should come as no surprise that the district’s middle managers--mainly principals and assistant principals--are talking about taking a drastic step: unionizing. Many principals say interest in forming a union is higher this year than it ever has been. They will push for a straw vote on the issue as early as this fall.

“There’s a different wind blowing,” said Eli Brent, newly elected president of the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, a nine-year-old professional association with 1,500 members, including most of the district’s principals and assistant principals. “Principals are saying, ‘Hey, where are we going to be next year? We would like more security, we want dignity, and we want respect.’ ”

Board of Education President Roberta Weintraub, who has not been regarded as overly sympathetic to the teachers’ union, not only understands the principals’ complaints but has encouraged them to organize.

“It might not be good for the school district for them to form a union,” said Weintraub. “But it’s not good for them to be run roughshod over, either. They’ve been abused and made out to be the bad guys by the (teachers’) union. You have a whole different ballgame going on out there now. I wouldn’t blame them (for organizing), not after this year.”

Unions Elsewhere

Los Angeles is one of a few big-city school districts in which administrators are not organized for collective bargaining, according to officials of the 12,000-member American Federation of School Administrators. San Francisco school administrators have been unionized since 1971, and locals also exist in New York, Chicago, Boston, Detroit and Washington.

Administrators’ unions are still far less common than teachers’ unions, but they are growing in number. The federation has chartered a dozen new locals in the last five years, including three in California--in Berkeley, Alameda County and Oakland. Soon, they will be joined by administrators in the San Juan Unified School District who voted in favor of union representation three weeks ago.

About 500 Los Angeles school district administrators attended an association meeting in May to hear representatives of administrators’ federation and the Assn. of California School Administrators debate the merits of unions.

The climate in Los Angeles is “very favorable for collective bargaining,” said Roland Demarais, the federation’s West Coast organizer, who attended the meeting. “They (school administrators) do want more respect from the Board of Education, and they want to be sure of their due process in personnel procedures.”

California law gives collective bargaining rights to school administrators whose work is deemed supervisory in nature. Under the 1976 Educational Employment Relations Act, supervisors are employees who have the authority to hire, transfer, suspend, discipline and promote other workers.

Different Category

They are distinguished from management employees, who are defined as those with significant responsibility for developing district policy and running district programs. Those higher echelon employees may not form unions.

In most districts, principals, assistant principals and other central office administrators still are part of the management team and rely on the superintendent to represent them in most matters, such as salary.

But in Los Angeles, the events of this last year have chilled that once cozy relationship.

“There is a sense of frustration and a feeling of being caught between a rock and a hard place,” said Mike Jeffers, principal of Harrison Street Elementary School in the City Terrace area. “The teachers’ union has done an excellent job of dividing us from that camaraderie we had with our staff. And the board members have lost the view of our role as the person who works for and conducts their policies.”

Granada Hills High School Principal Anne Falotico said principals “see the handwriting on the wall.

“We see a very strong (teachers’) union and the implications to middle management . . . who will be called upon to enforce district policy,” she said. “We see evidence that you don’t know from one moment to another what your (status) will be. There is a growing feeling that principals need a contract.”

Action in Oakland

Similar worries recently propelled administrators in the Oakland Unified School District to form United Administrators of Oakland, which was certified by the state as a collective bargaining agent late last year. The Oakland administrators were pushed to take that step by a Board of Education decision a few years ago to give a raise to teachers but not to them.

“That outraged administrators,” said Stan Kistner, a former teachers’ union president who became a principal and now heads the Oakland local. “Those people worked hard to keep schools open during a strike, but they were not rewarded in any way. In fact, there was a lot of reassignment of administrators without any kind of consultation. We felt we were being run roughshod over.”

Many Los Angeles principals say they are alarmed by a series of prospective changes involving salary and duties that were recently endorsed by the board. District salaries would be restructured so that teachers with similar qualifications could earn as much as administrators and all administrators would be required to spend some time teaching every other year. Principals would be required to spend 90 hours teaching, compared to 45 hours for central office administrators.

Last month the board also considered two budget cuts that would have trimmed principals’ and assistant principals’ pay. Although neither cut ultimately was made, the fact that they were considered at all “is not a message that we (the board) love you (administrators),” said Brent. “The anger we feel is one of being betrayed.”

In addition, the advent of “shared decision-making”--a new teachers’ contract provision that shifts some authority to new neighborhood school councils--has raised concerns among many principals. Under the contract, teachers will hold half of the council seats, the principal will have one vote, and parents and community members will fill the remaining slots.

Little Influence

Many principals complain that while they support the tenets of power-sharing, they have had little opportunity to help formulate the councils and worry about being held accountable for council decisions they may not endorse.

Teachers’ union officials scoff at such complaints, saying administrators wield considerable clout and earn substantial salaries even though they do not have a union. For instance, all administrators, including Supt. Leonard Britton, were granted 8% pay raises in 1988-89 and 1989-90. In addition, principals and assistant principals will receive an 8% increase in 1990-91 as well, giving them the same 24% three-year increase teachers won after the strike.

The pay range for elementary principals this year is $51,412 to $75,925, compared to $27,346 to $47,675 for teachers.

Principals, said United Teachers-Los Angeles President Wayne Johnson, do not need a union.

The problem “is ego,” Johnson said. “You’ve got a lot of principals that have suddenly seen UTLA become very vocal, very aggressive and willing to take them on. Their power on school sites has never been challenged before. So they feel very threatened. And they respond by saying ‘Let’s form our own union.’

“But you’re only a union if . . . your basic threat is to withhold your services. They will never do that. It will be a union on paper only. It will be a sweetheart union.”

Effects Questioned

Fred Leonard, field services director for the Assn. of California School Administrators, said a union contract would not necessarily give administrators more job security than they have under existing district policies or result in better raises compared to other school employees.

Unionizing administrators also would frustrate attempts to promote “nonadversarial relationships” between school boards and their employees, he said.

“Jumping in and saying we need collective bargaining when there are other reasonable ways to resolve (labor conflicts) is something they may come to regret,” Leonard predicted.

Brent, who is principal of an elementary magnet school in Sherman Oaks, said most principals in the Los Angeles district would prefer to remain part of management because they find the relationship “very comfortable.”

But he also said that he does not think unionizing would be a mistake.

“It’s a hell of a note that people have to become militant and do things they don’t want to do to create change,” Brent said.

At the very least, Brent said, he wants to open discussions with Britton and the board to develop a “bill of rights” for principals. He said he plans to hold more meetings in the fall to present information on supervisory unions and that a straw vote on unionizing could be held then.