Teachers Protest Over Salaries : Schools: Palos Verdes contract negotiations are at an impasse. New talks are set to begin Tuesday.

Duane Thompson has taught math in the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District for 28 years, but there is one equation he can’t figure out.

Why, he wonders, are teachers in the upscale school district paid so little while their top administrator earns so much?

Palos Verdes’ most experienced teachers earn $48,530 a year, ranking them in the bottom 25% among unified school district teachers in Los Angeles County. At the same time, Supt. Michael Caston draws a $115,000 annual paycheck, making him the fourth-highest paid in the county.

To Thompson, the figures convey a painful message.

“(District administrators) are treating us like the people who clean their pools,” said Thompson, who teaches at Miraleste Intermediate in Rancho Palos Verdes. “They don’t respect us as professionals. They look at us more as laborers (whose) time is not as valuable as theirs.”

Caston, who came to Palos Verdes Peninsula two years ago, bristles at the comparison and points out that the district’s teachers have seen their salaries rise by 17.5% in the past three years. He also said that the district already spends about 54% of its $32-million budget on teacher salaries and that to give the district’s 370 teachers a 1% raise would cost about $250,000 a year.

The teachers, who opened contract negotiations last April with a request for a 10% raise, have been working without a contract since June. The district countered by offering them a 1.5% one-time bonus and possible cost-of-living increases over the next two years, both contingent upon the receipt of state funds. But the offer was rescinded in December when it became clear that the state money would not come through.

Although further negotiations are scheduled for Tuesday, teachers and administrators have been at a virtual impasse since December.

“I think what people have to realize is that Palos Verdes is another school district in the state (that) receives the same funding as everyone else,” Caston said. “Just because wealthier people live here doesn’t mean we can pay teachers more than others do.”

In fact, Palos Verdes students--who are predominantly Anglo but include a growing number of Asians--are so high-achieving and have such a minuscule dropout rate that the district cannot qualify for many state and federal funds that districts in poorer communities receive.

In the 1989-90 school year, fewer than 1% of the district’s 8,700 students dropped out of school. That same year, the California Assessment Program ranked Palos Verdes students in the 94th percentile in writing and the 98th percentile in math and reading.

Still, for teachers who can’t help but notice that more than 50% of the households in the community where they work earn more than $100,000 a year, the district’s explanations sound like the rattle of loose change.

Beginning teachers in the Palos Verdes district earn $22,430 a year, and teachers with 25 years of experience and a master’s degree earn $48,530. More than half of the district’s 370 teachers are in the highest earning bracket.

The highest-paid teachers in the county are in the Montebello Unified School District, where the most experienced earn $57,510 a year. However, only about 14% of the district’s 1,260 teachers are at that level, and all of them agreed to take a 2.3% cut last July to help keep the district out of bankruptcy.

Palos Verdes teachers acknowledge that finances are tight, but they contend that the district has not made teacher salaries one of its top priorities.

In protest, more than 200 teachers toted picket signs during a march through Rolling Hills Estates on Thursday afternoon.

The demonstration began at the end of the school day in the parking lot of Palos Verdes Peninsula High School and ended at a business center parking lot about five blocks away. Along the way, several drivers honked their horns in support of the teachers, who pinned blue ribbons to their lapels and carried signs saying “District Priorities Graded F” and “Apples Don’t Pay the Bills.”

At the end of the march, the teachers selected “Will Teach For Food” as their favorite picket sign slogan. The author, fifth-grade teacher Sue Bernard, won dinner for two at the Velvet Turtle.

“There’s no money for the necessities. How can you live?” said Bernard, who has had to take out a second mortgage on her house to make ends meet. “I take home, after all this time and a master’s degree, about $22,000 a year.”

When contract negotiations stalled late last year, the teachers vowed to stop seeing students outside of classroom hours and to cease taking home their work or writing letters of recommendation for college-bound seniors.

Although students have been generally supportive of their teachers, some students say the work slowdown is taking a toll in the classroom.

High school freshman Steve Lee, 14, said that students having trouble in algebra class no longer receive extra help from their teacher before and after school. When Lee’s parents saw how badly he scored on his last two exams, they hired a math tutor to help him bring up his grades.

“She (my teacher) said she was sorry she couldn’t help us out anymore but she said if they don’t protest now, the future generation is going to be hurt,” Lee said.

And high school senior Marie Glowacki, 17, said she had to scramble at the last minute to find a teacher who would write a letter of recommendation for her college applications.

“It was really hard,” said Glowacki, who has applied to Boston University and the University of Southern California. “I asked one teacher, who said he would do it, and then he turned around and said he wouldn’t. . . . I knew it was because of the salary situation, but I was kind of mad.”

Several veteran teachers say it has been more than a decade since teachers have been this angry at the district. The last time that teachers marched en masse was in 1978, when they were trying to negotiate their first collective bargaining agreement with the district.

The current crisis was triggered when district officials broke their promise to increase teacher salaries after teachers had agreed to go along with the controversial consolidation of three high schools into one last fall.

The district consolidated the schools because of declining enrollment, saving about $3 million a year, but the district had been spending beyond its means by the same amount, Caston said.

“When the district was doing the consolidation, there was talk that we could save money and this would help teachers, but with the recession that just didn’t pan out,” Caston said.

The teachers have urged the district to seek permission from the state to pay for salary increases with some of the $8 million it has accumulated from the sale of closed school sites. Caston, however, said the district already earmarks about $600,000 in interest from those restricted funds, much of which helps support teachers’ salaries.

Nevertheless, many teachers insist that the district has the means to improve teachers’ salaries--but not the will.

“This is a very conservative-minded community,” said Mara Littell, a second-grade teacher at Rancho Vista Elementary School in Rolling Hills Estates. “They want to keep that $8 million, saying, ‘We want to save it for a rainy day.’ But we keep saying this is a rainy day.”