SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO : Teachers Balk at Suspension Clause

Talks between the teachers’ union and administration have broken down over a contract clause that would allow the district to suspend tenured teachers without pay.

Superintendent Jerome Thornsley said the clause would allow the district to discipline teachers without firing them.

He cited a case in which a teacher was found to have stolen some rings from the student activities office and pawned them. In another situation, a teacher went to Florida on a sales trip and, after returning, told the district he had been gone because he was sick. Both teachers were suspended.

“Right now, if a teacher is guilty of indiscretions such as these, we only have two choices. We either do nothing or we go for the death penalty and dismiss them.”

But union President Ric Stephenson said Monday: “We won’t sign anything with something like that on it. We won’t even discuss it.”

The clause would allow Capistrano Unified School District officials to suspend teachers without pay for up to 15 workdays for infractions outside the realm of schoolwork, said Jacqueline Cerra, spokeswoman for the 23,000-student district.

“This involves items other than regular professional assignments,” Cerra said. “We need to have some sort of mechanism to deal with these types of problems.”

Thornsley said the clause is new to the district but not unusual. School districts in Irvine and Anaheim have such clauses.

Stephenson, however, said that the state Education Code and the district’s teacher evaluation policy are adequate mechanisms for discipline. He added that he would not want to leave the determination of “just cause” in cases such as these to district administrators.

“If we had faith in every district administrator, we wouldn’t worry about the ‘just cause.’ But we don’t,” said Stephenson, a history teacher at Newhart Junior High School in Mission Viejo, said.

Thornsley said the district offered to go to arbitration to decide these cases. “That way the burden of proof would be on the district,” Thornsley said. But Stephenson said that process would be too costly.

Representatives from the district and teachers met Friday, the third meeting between teachers, officials and a state mediator in the last 30 days. Cost-of-living increases and retirement issues also were pending, Stephenson said, but the disciplinary clause was the major block to a settlement.