HUNTINGTON BEACH : 3 Schools Kept Open; Teachers Are Angry

By postponing a plan to close three elementary schools as a cost-cutting measure, the Ocean View School District Board of Trustees this week satisfied hundreds of angry parents. However, with the same stroke, the district has incensed many of the district’s 400 teachers.

Teachers union leaders, embroiled in the 13th month of an often-bitter contract dispute, said Thursday that the estimated $750,000 the district would have saved by shutting down Golden View, Haven View and Lake View elementary schools could have helped settle their demands for a pay raise and improved health benefits.

And the board’s decision Wednesday night to put off school closures for at least a year has increased the likelihood that teachers will refuse to show up for classes when school resumes in the fall, said Jim Harlan, executive director of the union representing the Ocean View School District Teachers Assn.

“At this point, I think you’re looking at school not opening in the fall in the Ocean View School District,” Harlan said Thursday.

The board’s decision, he said, “is a slap in the face to this district’s employee organizations,” Harlan said. “Once again, the school board has shown that teachers are the lowest priority in the district.

They can’t even settle a contract with teachers over a year’s time, but after three nights of hearings with angry parents, they vote not to close any schools.”

While board members held three public hearings on a controversial plan to close the schools, union and district officials this week have been meeting with a state arbitrator with hopes of reaching a settlement. After a meeting Wednesday failed to resolve the feud, officials scheduled another hearing for June 20.

Although union and district spokesmen declined to discuss details of the negotiations, both sides said that a settlement does not appear imminent.

Supt. Monte McMurray and school board members acknowledged Thursday that the board’s decision further complicates the teachers’ contract dispute.

“It does place a greater restriction on you, in that you don’t have the flexibility you’d like,” McMurray said. “This calls for tougher budget decisions to be made, and it probably means more severe cuts than would’ve been required” if schools were closed.

The school closures had been considered as a means of shrinking the district’s current budget shortfall, estimated to be between $1.3 million and $1.8 million.

Board members are now faced with making sizeable spending cuts in other areas to balance the budget by September, and would have to economize even more if the district agrees to teachers’ demands, district officials said.

Trustee Carolyn Hunt, who voted with members Janet Garrick and Sheila Marcus to put off school shutdowns for another year, dismissed Harlan’s comments as “traditional rhetoric.”

“The teacher’s union has an obligation to its membership to react as they have. That’s expected of them,” Hunt said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a coming together on this issue. . . . It’s time we put to rest these negotiations, because we have a lot of important business to do.”

But board President Charles Osterlund, who, along with Trustee Elizabeth A. Spurlock, abstained from the school closure vote, said: “I’m incredulous we’ve ended up in this situation. I can see how this would upset the employees within this district.”

If no agreement on the contract has been reached by mid-summer, McMurray said his staff will begin recruiting substitute teachers to prepare for a strike in the fall.