Tentative Pact OKd in Tustin

After 15 straight hours of negotiations, the Tustin Unified School District and the Tustin Educators Assn. reached tentative agreement on a contract at midnight Friday, indicating the end of a bitter struggle involving teachers’ refusals to assign homework or attend open houses.

If approved by the school board and the teachers, the agreement could relieve tension that has built as contract negotiations dragged on.

The 430 teachers and counselors represented by the teachers union are now in their 11th month with no contract, with little more than a month remaining in the school year.

Some teachers have picketed board meetings and negotiation sessions, discontinued extracurricular activities, stopped assigning homework and skipped open houses.

The impasse in contract negotiations has angered parents as well as students, who held a sit-in at one school to protest the lack of homework and failure to reach an agreement. At the April 30 school board meeting, parents, teachers and students pleaded with the board and the union to reach an agreement and end the disruption of education.

In a previous proposal, the district offered teachers an average 9.4% salary increase for the first year of a two-year contract. That would have meant raises ranging from $2,000 to $6,884 a year for teachers, depending on their education and experience with the district. Teachers wanted more money and suggested offsetting the extra salary by making the increase retroactive only for part of the year. They also requested some changes in the proposed salary structure, which they said was inequitable.

Joyce Rohrbaugh, president of the Tustin Educators Assn., said the tentative agreement will be presented to the teachers Monday and should be voted on by the end of the week or the beginning of the following week.

Rohrbaugh and Paul Fisher, chief business administrator for the district, said they could not release any details of the proposal until a joint statement is issued Monday.

“It’s kind of unfair to have everybody and their cousin to know what’s going on before the teachers know,” Rohrbaugh said.

Although the two sides have met several times with a state mediator, the mediator was not present on Friday.

“With the mediator not there, we were able to talk directly to the district’s negotiation team,” Rohrbaugh said. “Sometimes it’s better to deal directly rather than go through a third party.”