Inglewood, Teachers in Tentative Pay Agreement

Negotiators for the teachers union in Inglewood reached a tentative agreement with the school district this week that calls for a retroactive 2% salary increase for last school year and 5.4% for the current year, which ends June 30.

The teachers and representatives of the Inglewood Unified School District will return to the negotiating table this summer to discuss the contract for the 1990-91 school year and beyond.

The tentative accord will not become final until approved by the 650-member Inglewood Teachers Assn. A vote is scheduled for Tuesday.

In approving the agreement Wednesday, school board members said they were relieved that the district had escaped a walkout like those that interrupted classes in Beverly Hills and Los Angeles last year. Throughout the tense negotiations, Inglewood’s teachers had threatened to strike if the district did not meet their salary demands.

Representatives of the teachers union said they still consider the salary increases to be too small, but they said they had no choice because an independent fact-finder last month supported the district’s assertion that it could not afford bigger raises.

The agreement also provides teachers with end-of-the-year bonuses in 1990-91 if they cut teacher absences. Administrators say that hiring substitutes for absent teachers put the district nearly $1 million over budget this school year. The district has agreed to distribute to teachers half of any reduction in substitute teacher costs next year.

Another provision of the agreement will require teachers to sign in and out at the beginning and end of the work day, which Cheryl Bell, the union president, called “another way of taking our professionalism away from us.”

While Lester Jones, the district’s chief negotiator, called the accord an “excellent settlement” and praised the board for acting in “a fiscally responsible manner,” Bell disagreed.

She refused to praise the agreement, calling it simply “the best deal I could get.”

The union had originally sought salary increases of 14% for 1988-89 and 10% for 1990-91; the teachers later requested 8% salary increases for each of those two years. The district’s latest offer had been 2.7% for 1988-89 and 2.5% for 1989-90.

In 1988, salaries for Inglewood teachers ranked 25th out of the 43 unified districts in Los Angeles County for those with bachelor’s degrees and 30th for those with master’s degrees.

Under the agreement, administrators will receive the same pay increase as teachers, their first pay raise in three years.

The district’s approximately 500 non-teaching employees are represented by another union, the California Professional Education Employees, and are due to negotiate a new contract soon.