SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : PSYCHIC INCOME : Teaching Remains a Labor of Love and Commitment : The pay is still low, but shortages and changing attitudes are likely to push salaries higher.

An interest in film-making has been Jeff Reed’s hedge against teacher burnout. He’s been known to splice clips together to make special movies for his history class at Huntington Park High School. He runs the school’s media center. And in January, he inaugurated a course that introduces students themselves to the camera, the computer and the editing deck.

“You have to keep growing as a human being and as a professional,” said Reed, a bearded, informal veteran of 10 years at the blackboard. Otherwise, he said, it’s all too easy to focus on the drawbacks of his chosen field: “Low pay, shoddy treatment, it’s all there.”

To Reed, a teaching career is “a moral decision. I can be socially productive and do something I feel good about.”

Teaching jobs are fairly plentiful locally these days. And in the wake of recent strikes, along with a national upsurge in interest in education, salaries appear to be headed up while school districts cede some control to faculty.

But budget crunches are a fact of school life too, and doubters say change must come even more rapidly to lure top-notch applicants. In Southern California, teacher salaries typically start at between $20,000 and $30,000; wages for the most senior, skilled faculty members may peak above $50,000 in top-paying districts.

“We’ve made some progress, especially in entry-level salaries, but the maximum salary is not enough and the conditions are still deplorable,” said Wayne Johnson, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles.

Job market analyst Victor R. Lindquist agreed: “The rate of teachers’ pay is going to have to escalate at twice the cost of living just to catch up” and compete with other fields, he said.

Across the country, “there are shortages right now in certain specialties,” said Lindquist, author of an annual survey of job opportunities for college graduates. “In five years, it’s going to be critical.”

Many Southern California cities including Los Angeles, Santa Ana and Long Beach are experiencing a tremendous growth in numbers of students--and need for teachers--largely because of the waves of immigrants washing over the area.

School systems are working especially hard to find bilingual, special education, math and science teachers. The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, is willing to help bilingual college graduates get certified to teach--while it pays them a $2,500 bonus.

Santa Ana took advantage of a cold spell in the Midwest to send recruiters there and planned a March 3 job fair with “contracts offered on the spot,” said district spokeswoman Diane Thomas.

In many districts, there even is a shortage of substitutes. To try to combat that, wages have been raised by as much as 25% over the past year in parts of Southern California.

But a surge in enrollments is not the only reason for a shortage of teachers. Low salaries and low prestige, when compared to many other professions, seem to have discouraged young people from entering the field. Nationally, bachelor’s degrees in education decreased from 144,000 in 1977 to 88,000 in 1985, the latest year for which figures were available, according to the American Assn. of College Teachers of Education.

“Since then, though we don’t have the numbers, we have a feeling that they are continuing to decline,” said Mark Lewis, a research assistant for the association.

Jeff Reed gets upset when he thinks about the lack of respect for teachers, from the world at large, from administrators, even from students who often don’t seem to try in class. He has felt lost in the system, under-recognized, even with changes in the teachers’ contract that allow for more faculty decision-making.

At 37, as a husband and father of two small boys, he is tired of living in a rented house. He teaches two nights a week at a local college in an effort to stockpile a down payment for his own place, but “even now it’s problematic,” he said.

And he calls his $36,000 wage “a financial sacrifice.” But it is one he has been willing to make for the rewards of teaching. Reed is excited about bringing “technological literacy” to his students and helping other teachers to use film and illustrations in their classes.

And then there is the sweetness of a perfectly executed lesson. Like the time just before Christmas when a class full of ninth-graders who read at the third-grade level came alive, discussing one of his film segments.

“We spent the whole hour all talking and arguing about it,” Reed said. “The timing was such that we finished right when the bell rang. I got ‘em going. I got ‘em hooked.”

For the 1990-91 academic year, the Los Angeles district will need to hire 1,600 to 2,000 teachers, with a steady stream of openings expected in the following years, said Michael P. Acosta, who supervises the school system’s recruitment and assignment of faculty.

Santa Ana Unified, the largest district in Orange County, will hire at least 350 teachers for the fall--17.5% above its 2,000-member work force--mostly due to growth. In the Long Beach Unified School District, with the number of students increasing by 2,000 a year, “we too have a tremendous need for teachers,” said Marietta Palmer, who oversees the system’s faculty hiring.

Not every local school system is in such straits. The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, for instance, has seen enrollment plummet from 16,000 students in 1975 to 9,200 today. Still, Assistant Supt. Mark Karadenes said he hired 50 teachers this year.

The affluent coastal district is popular with applicants, with 300 hopefuls for every opening, Karadenes said. But even that number seems to reflect a decline in interest from a decade ago, when each slot attracted 3,000 applicants.

Indeed, Wayne Johnson, the teachers union president, said he would hesitate to advise a college student to enter teaching these days. “My heart tells them to get into teaching, because it’s the key to our future,” he said. “But on a personal level, you can do other things. Unless things change dramatically, you may find this very frustrating.”

Jeff Reed understands such ambivalence. But when his wife recently told him she wanted to leave her bookkeeping work and get a credential for teaching music in elementary schools, he encouraged her. “I think it’s a good thing,” he said. “I think she has the calling.”