School Labor Disputes Test All Sides’ Patience : Education: Pickets have become a permanent part of the picture at four South County districts. The only thing settled is that declining enrollments are to blame for impasses.

Inside Jim Harlan’s cluttered office at the West Orange County United Teachers headquarters, a white grease-pencil board consumes most of one wall. Black vertical lines divide the board into four sections, each column topped by the name of an elementary school district whose teachers the union represents.

Beneath two of the columns are erasure marks, over which the word settled has been scribbled. The other two sections are crammed with figures and notes that translate into the latest status of labor negotiations in those districts.

“It’s a never-ending battle,” Harlan said, sifting through a mound of papers on his desk. “You get one district settled, and there’s still three to go.”

Perennial labor disputes over pay and fringe benefits have hit isolated school districts in Anaheim, Orange, San Juan Capistrano and Tustin. But in West Orange County elementary school districts, irate teachers marching and carrying signs have become as much a ritual of school life as report cards and Christmas vacation.

Teachers in the Ocean View Elementary School District are now in their 13th month of working without a contract. An agreement was reached two weeks ago in the Fountain Valley School District after a year without a contract. The Westminster and Huntington Beach City school districts, which respectively took nine months and a year to resolve their 1989-90 feuds, appear headed for another year of rocky negotiations, leaders on both sides predict.

For at least the last five years, none of the four districts have settled a contract without, at minimum, the aid of a state mediator. Huntington Beach teachers went on strike in 1988, but a contract agreement was reached after one day on the picket line.

Tumultuous negotiations in the Fountain Valley district stretch even longer, with an impasse declared every year since the state’s collective bargaining process was established in 1976. (An impasse in the talks must be declared before a state mediator can step in.) Fountain Valley teachers went on strike for 17 days in 1980.

The central issue, district and union officials agree, is declining enrollment. West Orange County’s housing boom, which peaked during the 1970s, has long since leveled out. Many couples who moved in during the era no longer have school-age children, and few young families can now afford the area’s high-priced housing, school officials say.

Consequently, enrollment in all four districts has plummeted since 1975. The Ocean View School District, for example, which served about 14,600 students in 1973, today includes just 8,400 students.

And because the districts are teaching fewer students, each year they are receiving a smaller slice of state funds. The district’s task of dividing up its money has become a trying, often bitter power struggle between teachers and administrators.

“That creates a financial problem all its own, which makes negotiations difficult,” said Thomas McCarthy, a state mediator who has intervened in disputes for all four districts.

But the dilemma runs deeper than enrollment figures. The Huntington Beach Union High School District, which handles students from the four elementary districts, also has grappled with a dwindling number of students each year. But labor relations in that district, whose union is also a member of West Orange County United Teachers, have never been better, district and union leaders say.

The key problem in the four elementary districts, Harlan and union leaders claim, is the relationship between district administrators and teachers. District officials are reluctant to meet with teachers outside of formal bargaining talks, fearing that comments made during an informal meeting could be misconstrued and used during bargaining.

District officials, however, pin much of the blame for the continual disputes on the West Orange County United Teachers organization.

Some administrators specifically fault Harlan. They point out that when Harlan worked for teachers in the Sacramento City Unified School District, the union he led called strikes in two successive years.

“My question is, what part does that play in our situation down here?” said one district administrator.

Teachers union presidents defended Harlan, saying he only carries out their instructions.

Harlan shrugs off the criticisms. “They’re always going to blame it on the new guy,” said Harlan, who was hired a year ago. “That’s just the way it goes. If that’s what it takes for teachers to get what’s due to them, I’ll take the blame.”

Ron Brown, assistant superintendent and lead negotiator for the Huntington Beach City School District, agrees that Harlan is “merely a product of what the teachers associations want to see in a local director.”

However, Brown criticizes the “philosophy” put forth by the union presidents as antagonistic, with threats of work slowdowns and even strikes often mentioned during negotiations. And he believes that this hostility is worsened under the umbrella union in which one negotiator--Harlan--represents all four unions in separate negotiations with each district.

Lead negotiators for the other three districts also assailed their respective unions for prolonging negotiations as a matter of ritual.

“The reason we have to take things to the nth degree is that we have to give our best effort to get anything at all for teachers,” said Carol Halbach, president of the Ocean View Teachers Assn. “We have to fight, scratch and claw to get anywhere.”

The problem, union leaders contend, is that administrators and school board members in the four districts believe that management concerns always take precedence over teachers’ requests. Budget crunch or no, they say, administrators consistently receive higher pay raises than teachers, and money is being spent to benefit district management operations instead of the classroom.

As examples, they point to the Ocean View School District, which is spending more than $2 million on new district offices but balks at teachers’ salary and classroom demands, and Huntington Beach City Supt. Diana Peters, who received a 12.1% pay increase while teachers fought for a year to gain a 7% raise.

Officials defend the new offices for Ocean View because the district is currently operating out of cramped quarters at a former elementary school site, and school board members said they gave Peters the raise for a job well done.

“It makes you stop and wonder why in a certain area you have four districts who have been facing the same problem at the same time,” said Ruth Pearl, president of the Fountain Valley Teachers Assn. “There seems to be a regional mind-set, in which there is not a conscious willingness to try something different. . . . (Negotiations) get to a certain point and then they just shut down. It’s like a wall seems to go up.”

Robert Sampica, Fountain Valley’s assistant superintendent, has a simpler explanation for the problem: “They don’t trust us, and we don’t trust them.”

Both administrators and union officials say they are hopeful that negotiations will become more conciliatory. In all four districts, officials are planning labor-relations seminars and studying other methods of smoothing out the bargaining process.

Most leaders from both sides, however, said they doubt any noticeable improvement in relations is likely in the near future. And the tension is nearing a breaking point, they say.