Teaching Assistants Seek Union Status : Benefits: School workers vital to bilingual programs are getting no vacation, sick or holiday pay or medical coverage.

Without Norma Herrera, half the students in the classroom she works in at 52nd Street School would be lost. A bilingual teaching assistant, she helps Spanish-speaking third graders read and translates for the teacher.

“The children depend on us for learning. We are their only channel of communication with the teacher,” said Herrera, one of 10,000 teaching assistants employed by the Los Angeles Unified School District.

But the teaching assistants, 70% of whom are bilingual Latinas, receive no benefits--no vacation, sick or holiday pay or medical coverage. They can be hired and fired at will.

Today they will ask the Los Angeles Board of Education to recognize them as members of Local 99 of the Service Employees International, which also represents bus drivers, custodians and cafeteria workers.

“I definitely do feel exploited,” Herrera said. “Without us, the bilingual system will not work.”

Most of the 60,000 teaching assistants statewide are represented by a union, but in Los Angeles--with the largest number of assistants--they have not organized until now. They make up the second-largest group of workers in the Los Angeles district, after the district’s 33,000 teachers and other credentialed employees.

The teaching assistants say they have been spurred to seek union representation in part because they want to raise standards and make the job more attractive by building in opportunities for career advancement. Many teaching assistants want to become teachers, but they say the assistant’s job offers no incentives to pursue the required college study necessary to earn a credential.

One reason why teaching assistants are bitter is that they are not treated as well as another classification of employees, called educational aides, who perform the same tasks.

Educational aides receive paid holidays, vacations and sick days and, if full time, are eligible for medical benefits. They can also qualify for extra pay if they pass a test showing proficiency in a language other than English. Aides were recognized by the board several years ago as members of Local 99.

Teaching assistants, unlike aides, do not receive extra pay for being bilingual. Also unlike the aides, assistants are required to be enrolled in a college course, although the district does not specify the type.

Aides and assistants work three to six hours a day five days a week. A full-time teaching assistant earns about $12,460 a year, compared to $13,025 for a full-time aide, according to figures provided by Local 99.

Teaching assistant jobs were created in the 1970s, about a decade after the educational aides were first hired, and proliferated as increasing numbers of non-English-proficient students entered the school system, said Barbara Lewis, an organizer for Local 99.

Lewis contends that the district created the teaching assistant positions in order to avoid the costs of paying benefits to thousands of workers.

“We feel it’s really criminal what the district has done,” she said.

Board member Mark Slavkin, who chairs the board’s personnel committee, believes the district should accept the assistants’ request for union representation. He acknowledged that the district created two classes of employees, in large part to save money. Most of the money to pay for teaching aides and assistants comes from special federal and state programs that support bilingual education and other efforts focusing on remedial and low-income students.

“As that funding has (grown) tight over the years . . . the incentives at the school site have been to hire fewer educational aides because of the (cost of paying) benefits, and to hire more TA’s because they’re cheaper,” Slavkin said.

“We can’t continue that way any further. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that in a district with so few bilingual teachers, we are largely dependent on (assistants) to allow us to serve the kids who don’t speak English,” Slavkin added.

The district has about 1,500 fully certified bilingual teachers--about one for every 100 limited-English students. They can earn a bonus of up to $5,000 a year. According to the district’s latest bilingual program survey, nearly two-thirds of the district’s more than 6,000 bilingual classrooms depend on paraprofessionals to deliver instruction in the students’ primary language. About 8,000 aides and assistants are bilingual.

Slavkin said the board’s chief concern in considering the teaching assistants’ request for union representation will be where the money will come from to cover the higher costs of providing them with medical coverage and other fringe benefits. According to the district’s top financial experts, the school system faces as much as $180 million in spending cuts next year, largely because of escalating salaries and benefits.

The board is not expected to take any action on the teaching assistants’ request today. According to state law, it can either voluntarily recognize Local 99 as the assistants’ bargaining agent or ask for an election to take place to determine support for the union.

Lewis said a majority of teaching assistants--about 6,000--have signed cards authorizing the union to represent them, and many already have joined the union.

Teaching aides and assistants perform a variety of tasks to help classroom teachers, from helping to prepare lesson materials to translating for bilingual students. District officials said the aides and assistants do not actually teach because they do not have the same training as teachers and are not certified by the state.

Teaching assistants, particularly those who are bilingual, however, say that many of them do teach, and thus deserve better treatment from the district.

“Most of the teachers we work for are monolingual,” said 52nd Street’s Herrera. “They cannot communicate with the children. We have to plan lessons. We have to present the lesson. Many times, I end up taking work home and creating things (tests and other lesson materials in Spanish) because the school doesn’t provide them. I do this on my own time.”

John Menchaca, a teaching assistant at Hoover Street School near Koreatown, said most of the students he helps--first graders who recently immigrated from Central America--not only lack English skills but have never attended kindergarten. “So we are initiating them in academics,” he said. “We are expected to bring them up to grade level.”

Jeannie Cervantes, a bilingual teaching assistant at Trinity Street School in South-Central Los Angeles, said she feels guilty if she becomes ill and stays home. “We know our kids will not have reading that day that we are absent. They will be given other things to do.”

Catherine Carey, a spokeswoman for United Teachers-Los Angeles, which represents the district’s teachers, librarians and counselors, said that teaching assistants provide an essential service, particularly in a bilingual classroom where the teacher speaks only English.

“Teachers do depend on the skills of teacher assistants and aides,” said Carey. “But the responsibility (for teaching) is on the teacher. Whatever they (assistants) do is under the direction of the teacher” who determines the learning objectives. Teaching aides “carry out the directions of teachers.”

Carey said that UTLA supports the teaching assistants’ efforts to gain union representation. The teachers’ union, in fact, considered mounting its own organizing campaign to attract them, but bowed out when it learned that Local 99 already had begun the effort.