Teacher Wins Settlement Over Tobacco Smoke : Workers’ compensation: L.A. district pays $29,999 to the Thousand Oaks woman, who filed a claim three years ago.

A Thousand Oaks woman has won $29,999 from the Los Angeles Unified School District as a settlement in a workers’ compensation claim she filed three years ago over exposure to secondhand smoke.

Esther Schiller, 56, received the settlement check from the school district this week.

Now Schiller, who worked for 10 years as a teacher, says she plans to take her campaign to other counties, where she is searching for other nonsmokers who have been injured by tobacco smoke.

“It’s like being attacked,” she said sitting in her back yard in Thousand Oaks, where she moved to get away from the smoggy Glendale area, her voice barely rising above a whisper. “It’s like being physically assaulted.”

An attorney for the Los Angeles Unified School District was unavailable for comment.

But a school district spokesman noted that the Los Angeles school board in 1990 adopted a policy that forbids anyone from smoking in school buildings, district offices and in district vehicles.

And an official at Sun Valley Junior High School, where Schiller taught, said that after her claim was filed, the school eliminated an indoor smoking area.

“The smoking area is now located in the patio area,” Sun Valley Principal Emilio Garcia said.

Schiller is one of a handful of workers who have successfully filed such claims against their employers, said Mark Pertschuk, an attorney and co-director of the Berkeley-based Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights.

Pertschuk said Schiller’s case was an important victory because “she really had severe injuries from passive smoke. She brought it to the attention of her employer, and they foolishly didn’t get it corrected.”

The organization does not collect statistics because many claims are never filed in court. But the range of settlements for injured workers has ranged from $30,000 to $80,000, he said.

The largest settlement on record was for a Marin County waiter who won an $85,000 settlement last year from a restaurant in Sausalito after he had a heart attack that he said was brought on by cigarette smoke, Pertschuk said.

Another Southern California case involves Andrea Portenier, a former Pacific Palisades insurance broker who filed a battery lawsuit against the insurance company Republic Hogg Robinson last year for exposing her to smoke.

“If you’re an employer in California, you’re dumb if you allow smoking and you have any nonsmokers in the workplace,” Pertschuk said.

Schiller, whose illness was diagnosed three years ago as chronic obstructive lung disease, last year moved away from the smoggy San Gabriel Valley to preserve what lung capacity she had left.

Schiller said her problems started about five years ago when she was working as a teacher at Sun Valley Junior High School in Sun Valley.

Because of the L-shaped configuration of the building, wind from a main floor classroom that had been converted into a smoking area blew up a stairwell and into her second-floor classroom.

Schiller said she noticed that she could no longer walk long distances, and the walk from her car to the classroom left her tired and breathless.

On the advice of her doctor, she temporarily moved to Yucca Valley and was taking medication for her chronic asthma.

“My voice would be a croak. I would mouth the words and nothing would come out,” she said.

She requested and was granted a transfer to Frost Junior High School in Granada Hills. But after discovering similar problems with smoking there, she filed for sick leave.

In October, 1989, she filed a workers’ compensation claim against the school district. And this week, she received a check from the district, which is self-insured.

Schiller, who speaks to community groups about the dangers of secondhand smoke, used to perform as a singer years ago. Now, she said, she is lucky if she can make it through the day without using an inhaler. She believes indoor smoking should be outlawed.

“It’s like a drunken driver, but these people are not drunk,” she said. “The bottom line is people should not be smoking in buildings.”