Compton : Teachers Call for Sanctions in Year-Old Contract Talks

Teachers in the Compton Unified School District have asked the California Teachers Assn. to sanction the district for what the teachers say is a refusal to negotiate.

“We’ve been trying to negotiate a contract with this district since last February,” said Muriel Brooks, president of the Compton Education Assn., which represents the district’s 1,085 teachers.

In December, the district asked for a state fact-finder, a move teachers branded as stalling because the fact-finding report will not be ready for a month. Sanctions, Brooks suggested, could include a plea to university job placement bureaus not to refer new teachers to Compton.

The CTA executive board is scheduled to take up the sanction request at its two-day meeting that begins today. However, CTA dropped sanctions from its bylaws a decade ago and CTA President Ed Foglia said he did not know what action the board would take.

The request, Foglia said, “points out more than anything that there’s a real chronic problem we’ve had in Compton in labor relations and we think it affects the school program.”