School Board Shelves Plan to Cut Its Pay

Los Angeles Board of Education members Monday shelved a proposal to reduce their annual salaries after learning that state law prevents them from imposing pay cuts on themselves.

However, all seven board members already have told the district’s top financial officer that they want to continue the 3% cut in their $24,000 annual salaries that each agreed to take last year and several have promised to take at least some additional reduction.

To help the Los Angeles Unified School District close a $247-million gap in its 1992-93 budget, employees are being asked to take pay cuts up to 10.5%, plus another 6% in unpaid days off. Board members Barbara Boudreaux and Roberta Weintraub in June asked their colleagues to do their part by voting themselves a salary reduction equal to the highest percentage cut imposed on employees.

But board attorney Richard K. Mason told members that state law precludes them from voting themselves a pay cut, just as it bars them from granting their own raises. If individual members wish to take a cut, they can do so by notifying district budget officials in writing, but they “could not force such a result against unwilling board members,” Mason said.

“I feel board members should make some sacrifice” before reducing employees’ salaries, a frustrated Boudreaux said after hearing Mason’s legal interpretation.

Board member Warren Furutani said he expects to take “the maximum cut” and urged others who are taking reductions to “go public with this” so employees and taxpayers will realize that board members have not spared themselves from the budget ax.

Not everybody will take the full percentage amount expected of some employees, however. Robert Booker, chief business and financial officer, said only some board members had asked to have additional sums withheld above the 3% cut begun last fiscal year.

Board Member Julie Korenstein, who, like several of her colleagues, has little outside income, said she will take a cut but will wait to see the results of employee contract talks before deciding how big it will be.

Employee salary cuts, which are subject to negotiations, are proposed at four levels. The lowest-paid workers--those earning $9.76 or less per hour and including most classroom aides and some cafeteria workers--would take no cuts beyond several unpaid days off.

Those earning between $9.77 and $13.67 per hour would get 5.5% reductions, while the salaries of those earning between $13.68 and $43.94 would be slashed by 8%. This group includes all teachers and principals. The 43 employees who earn more than that would be hit with 10.5% cuts.

In addition, from 13 to 17 unpaid days off would be imposed, and some additional savings would come from changing health benefits. The district also is offering some groups more unpaid days off in exchange for a small drop in the anticipated pay cut rates.

The biggest of the district’s eight unions, United Teachers-Los Angeles, which has been highly critical of the methods used to balance the budget, is scheduled to respond publicly today to the pay cut proposals.

But Monday’s meeting was not all doom and gloom. Board members approved a privately funded plan to launch a sports academy at Audubon Middle School, aimed at encouraging inner-city youngsters to excel in school.

The program is a project of the Los Angeles Sports Academy, an organization launched recently by Winston Doby, a vice chancellor at UCLA, and former UCLA basketball coach Walt Hazzard. It aims “to create in low-income minority communities an academic and athletic environment which produces socially conscious, responsible and educated youth.”

Doby and Hazzard expect to expand the two-year program, to begin at Audubon this month, to include other inner-city middle schools. They have not specified how much they will spend on the program.

In other action, the board unanimously approved Korenstein’s motion forbidding new air conditioning or “cosmetic” improvements at administrative offices until the district can afford to install cooling systems in all classrooms. Exceptions to the ban can be made with board approval.