Teachers Lose 16% Pay Raise Due to State Budget Crunch : Education: School district says it is unable to honor terms of its two-year contract, so negotiations will have to start over.

The state budget crunch has cost Long Beach Unified School District teachers a two-year, 16% raise, sending negotiators back to the bargaining table to decide how much of a pay raise, if any, the teachers will salvage.

The district’s tentative contract with teachers, which had been scheduled to take effect this month, included an 8% raise for each of the next two years. But the raise was contingent on the district’s getting more money from the state, which has not happened, Deputy Supt. Ron Bennett said.

The district budget grew by $8 million this year to $302 million, but the increase resulted from the district’s growing student enrollment, not an increase in money received per student, Bennett said. District enrollment this year is expected to top 75,000, an all-time high.

“Our district ended up with less money than any of us had expected,” said Jim Deaton, president of the Teachers Assn. of Long Beach. “The district came to us and said it can’t honor the agreement. We are now in the process of going back to the bargaining table. We’ll go through the whole process again, just like we’re starting a new contract.”

Until a new contract is signed, the district’s 3,100 teachers will continue to work under the terms of the expired one.

Bennett said that teachers and district officials face difficult contract negotiations. “We have a tough bargaining session because we have nothing to give basically, and we have teachers that want and deserve raises.”

The union will make a contract proposal later this month in a fiscal climate that remains murky. Schools statewide needed a 5% increase in money per student to stay even with inflation, Bennett said. State tax revenues were hit hard by the recession, however, and lawmakers decided that schools had to bear some of the pain of balancing the budget. As a result, schools received in August only a .78% increase based on each district’s budget of two years ago.

State lawmakers did, however, grant school systems some additional budget relief. They said districts could skip this year’s payments into the Public Employees’ Retirement System, saving the Long Beach district between $4 million and $4.5 million. State employees already have filed suit to stop the encroachment on their retirement fund, Bennett said, so the cost saving may prove short-lived.

“We can’t figure out yet exactly what funding we’re going to get, for it changes from day to day,” Bennett said. “This is the fourth consecutive year that the amount of money we receive per student, after adjusting for inflation, has gone down.”

Teacher pay in Long Beach averages about $39,000 and can range from $23,443 to $51,592, slightly below the median for teachers in Los Angeles County.

Traditionally, district pay has ranked higher, and officials said they wanted to increase salaries in part to help the district recruit teachers. The district has an acute shortage of bilingual teachers. Less than half of the district’s bilingual classes are taught by a bilingual instructor. More than 30% of its students have a limited ability to speak English.

Most teachers accept that the now-void contract represented a good-faith effort by the district to raise pay, the union’s Deaton said. Despite having to begin school without a contract, there is little or no hostility so far between instructors and the district.

“We all did everything that we could in good faith to keep from being in this position,” Bennett said. “We see the state as the common enemy.”

NEXT STEP

The state budget pinch led this month to the voiding of a new contract that granted Long Beach teachers a 16% pay raise over two years. The teachers union plans to submit a new contract proposal on Sept. 23, with bargaining likely to follow in October. In the meantime, the district’s 3,100 teachers are working under the terms of the contract that expired Aug. 31.