College Agrees to Back Pay for 8 Instructors : Antelope Valley: The action ends a six-year battle. A state Court of Appeal panel ruled that the nurses had not been compensated properly.

The governing board of Antelope Valley College, having lost a six-year legal battle that was one of the longest and costliest in its history, agreed Monday to pay more than $350,000 to eight women nursing instructors who claimed they had been wrongfully underpaid.

The instructors--seven who still work at the college and one who has retired--sued in 1984, contending that they had not been given proper salary credit for work experience and academic credits. A state Court of Appeal panel sided with the instructors in August, capping the long legal battle.

The lawsuit involved the school’s two-tier salary tables, for academic and vocational instructors. The suit contended that some of the nursing instructors had been wrongly placed on an academic salary schedule, instead of on the higher-paid vocational schedule, and that others were ranked too low on the vocational schedule. The college has since ceased using the split-salary schedules for instructors, but college officials have continued to defend their salary practices.

The college board approved the payments by a 5-0 vote--with no discussion in public session--after emerging from a closed-door meeting with its attorney.

Nancy Hoverman--one of the instructors and president of the faculty union, the Antelope Valley College Federation of Teachers--said she was pleased with the outcome but frustrated that it took such a long fight against the college to prevail.

Hoverman said the women in her group, which includes all but one of the full-time faculty members in the college’s Allied Health Division, began their lawsuit alleging gender discrimination. But she said they later learned that male vocational teachers at the college also had similar problems.

“I guess it’s just been a whole, big, unfortunate situation that could have been settled years ago for much less,” Hoverman said. “They would have saved the public quite a bit of money had it been settled in-house.”

The court-ordered direct payments amount to $325,273, about two-thirds back salaries and about one-third interest on the back salaries. The college also will have to pay $9,054 in attorneys fees and court costs for the nurses and an estimated $18,000 in added retirement fund payments for them. The women received their interest payments last week, but have yet to receive the back salary.

The salary and interest payments ranged from a low of $3,916 for Hoverman to a high of $91,153 for instructor Emily Pack, according to college officials. The payments represent salary adjustments for the instructors for five to 13 years of work.

Larry Rosenzweig, the Santa Monica attorney who represented the instructors on behalf of their parent union, the California Federation of Teachers, said the back pay owed Hoverman is still a subject of dispute with the college and he is seeking at least an additional $20,000 for her.

At issue in the case, which the Lancaster-based community college fought stubbornly through a change of its president and several shake-ups in its governing board, was whether administrators had followed a uniform salary schedule in deciding nursing instructors’ pay.

In its August ruling, the Court of Appeal found that “there was no consistency” in the college’s salary decisions. In a July, 1989, decision, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Miriam Vogel found the college had been “careless and inconsistent.”