City Coaches Promote Plan to Raise Pay

City Section coaches, frustrated by what they call poor salaries for their coaching duties, want to change the method by which their pay is determined and thus raise it.

Currently, coaches receive a fixed stipend ranging from $1,202 to $1,785 a season based on sport and level. Varsity football, basketball and baseball coaches earn the top figure, for example, and assistant and junior varsity coaches of minor sports earn the lower figure.

Under the plan devised at a recent coaches’ meeting, coaches would be paid a percentage of their annual teachers’ salaries. Teachers’ salaries in the Los Angeles Unified School District range from $27,000 to $50,000 a year with an average of $42,500. Coaches want to open negotiations at 10% of their annual salaries.

Coaches agreed on the plan this month at a joint meeting of the Los Angeles Coaches Assn. and the Coaches of L. A. Women’s Sports, the groups that represent coaches of boys’ and girls’ sports among the City Section’s 49 high schools. To advance their cause, the coaches appointed an executive committee that includes some of the section’s most prominent coaches. The panel includes Carson High football Coach Gene Vollnogle, Crenshaw basketball Coach Willie West, and Paul Knox, president of the L. A. Coaches Assn. and football and track coach at Dorsey.

“We wanted to get some of our best coaches because people will listen to them,” Monroe football Coach Dave Lertzman said.

Lertzman, who also is on the executive committee, is a former president of the coaches’ association.

“Right now the supplemental pay schedule is not linked to anything,” he said. “We’re at the mercy of the (school) board. We don’t want to have to beg for money, so we want to tie our coaching salaries to our teaching salaries. That way, when teachers get a raise, coaches get a raise.”

Coaches received an 8% raise last spring as part of the contract settlement after the teachers’ strike. Although teachers’ salaries will increase 8% each year of the three-year contract, the raise for coaches is for one year only.

Wayne Johnson of United Teachers-Los Angeles sympathizes with the coaches. The union president says the idea also should include other extra-curricular activities such as band, theater, speech and debate.

The next step for the coaches is to earn a spot in the union’s bargaining package.

Contract negotiations are not scheduled to begin until next year, but the current financial atmosphere at the district is not promising. To balance the 1990-91 budget, the district already has cut $113 million and is expected to cut $57 million more.

“I understand their concern and we’re grateful on behalf of all the athletes they work with for all the hours they put in,” school board President Jackie Goldberg said. “But if they want more money put into the pot, where’s the money going to come from?”