O.C. Teachers’ Morale Low as School Starts : Education: Battered by budget cuts and burdened with more work, they battle against losing heart.

As the opening day of school draws near, Linda Oliver still looks forward to the same thing she has cherished for 22 years as a teacher in Anaheim: the rows of fresh-faced children that will greet her.

As much as she loves teaching, however, Oliver finds it harder and harder to maintain her morale. The passing years have brought her bigger classes, more duties and more children who have little respect for learning, trouble at home, or a poor command of English.

“It’s getting more and more difficult to just teach, “ said Oliver, 44, who teaches third-graders at Sunkist Elementary School in Anaheim. “I’m still energized by it, by the fact that I can make a difference in their lives. But it is getting harder. I get together with my close (teacher) friends and we give each other pep talks.”

As 16,000 teachers return to Orange County’s classrooms this week, Oliver is not alone in feeling a bit weary. From rookies to veterans, teachers generally express a missionary zeal for the job and its many rewards. But most, battered by years of budget cuts and burdened with an increasing workload, also say they battle against losing heart.

“I feel that morale is getting lower, not only for myself, but for many teachers,” said Maureen O’Brien, 39, who teaches fourth and fifth grade at Washington Elementary School in Santa Ana. “Our job is becoming more and more difficult with today’s challenges.”

Oliver said she finds that with the growing number of single-parent families or families in which both parents work, more students call upon her to be a helpmate, adviser, or shoulder to cry on. She also spends more time “being a mother and father” to children from troubled families who arrive without lunch or upset by conflict at home.

Milbrey McLaughlin, a professor at Stanford University’s School of Education, has spent the last five years researching the correlation between teachers’ performance and the way they perceive their jobs. She has found that they and their performance have been affected by a matrix of budget cutbacks and uncertainty about how to teach a young generation unlike any in the past.

“At times the budget crunch leaves them feeling absolutely marooned,” McLaughlin said. “They are trying their best, without either the proper professional development or emotional support they need to rethink what students today need. Their budgets are being cut. There is a perception that schools are failing. All this gives teachers the message that they are widgets, not valued professionals.”

McLaughlin said teachers have not learned how to handle a student body of enormous cultural diversity, in which children have varying expectations and attitudes about school. Many students juggle their schoolbooks with jobs. A glance at the job market has made many others cynical about the value of education.

The same themes emerged repeatedly in interviews with teachers around Orange County.

Changing demographics have produced classrooms of children of widely varying backgrounds and educational attainments. Pamela Hutchins, 33, said that is the roughest part of her job teaching first grade at Washington Elementary School in Santa Ana.

“Last year, I had kids who didn’t know their alphabet and couldn’t write numbers,” she said. “They should come out of kindergarten with those skills. Sometimes I feel like I’m barely keeping up, between grading all their papers and coming up with lessons that meet all their needs.”

In Orange County and around California, enrollment is skyrocketing and budget constraints prevent districts from hiring as many teachers as they say they need. As a result, classes are getting bigger, averaging about 28 pupils per class in Orange County last year. Growing class size is a common complaint among teachers because students get less personal attention.

Amber Stinson, 26, who is beginning her third year as a teacher, said the size of her classes has been her toughest challenge. In her combination first- and second-grade classes at William T. Newland Elementary School in Huntington Beach this year, she will have 32 to 34 pupils.

“It’s impossible to reach everyone,” she said. “I’m afraid that someone will slip by without getting adequate attention. What’s disillusioning is the amount of time I end up spending before school, after school, helping the kids because there isn’t enough time during the regular school day. It’s so draining.”

And yet, Stinson said that despite the difficulties she remains totally committed to her profession.

“I don’t regret my decision (to go into teaching) one bit,” she said. “The kids are what make it worth it.”

But there is no shortage of frustration in trying to provide weekly lessons to the children. Over and over, teachers complain that tight budgets leave them without adequate supplies.

Oliver spends $1,000 of her own money each year buying books, art supplies, colorful stickers and pencils. (“Each teacher is allotted one pencil per child per month,” she says. “Just try making a pencil last a month.”)

Mark Hamilton, 39, who teaches at Valley High School in Santa Ana, said that last year he had 38 students and only 11 textbooks, so he came to work just after dawn on many days to photocopy lessons for his students.

Jeff Dotson and Ruth Symonds, science teachers at Ladera Vista Junior High School in Fullerton, both love their jobs. But they wish their district’s budget would permit the purchase of newer classroom computers.

“Having one outdated, 10-year-old computer (for a whole class) is like working with one pencil,” she says.

Dotson thinks his mechanical drawing students would be much better prepared for the working world if they learned their skills on computers instead of on old-fashioned drafting tables. Symonds, who uses a computer in general science lessons, agrees.

Many teachers complain that the taxpaying public pays lip service to the importance of education but does not truly value teachers or understand their struggles.

“One of my biggest problems with teaching is how society views you,” said Ken Ezratty, 26, who teaches history and government at Dana Hills High School in Dana Point. “Many parents don’t see the value of education anymore. People use the schools as a baby-sitter. Parents aren’t willing to get as involved in their children’s lives as they used to be. Teachers can only do so much if there’s no support (for them) at home.”

Teachers also feel undervalued by the state lawmakers, who keep eroding education spending, and by the districts, which have doled out successive years of pay cuts, freezes or only modest salary increases. Even though Orange County teachers average higher salaries than their counterparts around California--$40,881, versus $39,439 statewide in 1991--they still feel underpaid, saying they earn less than many other professionals.

Teachers are also angered by state and local budget cuts that deprive students of entire class periods or enough teachers and counselors. They resent it when the public blames them for the quality of education because they believe that it is the public and their elected lawmakers who are responsible.

“It’s paradoxical,” said Diane Crow, regional manager for the California Teachers Assn. “Teachers are teaching because they are missionaries. They go back each year with a sense of renewal and recommitment.

“But certainly, (they have) the biggest sense of disappointment and frustration that they’ve ever had. The teachers have not failed the schools. The public has failed public education by not supporting it in a way it deserves, by not coming through with the money and community partnership, the parental involvement that it takes.”

The growing burdens of teaching have prompted some to worry that fewer people might choose it as a profession. Mary Kay Tetreault, dean of Cal State Fullerton’s teacher-training department, said many students in her program express worries about the uncertainties of teaching in a state beset by budget cuts.

But the potential rewards of influencing so many young lives still attracts them to the field. Teacher credentialing programs at UC Irvine and Cal State Fullerton report steadily increasing numbers of applicants.

Mary Lou Watkins understands why. After 22 years of teaching, she is still as much in love with her job as she was when she started. Recently she had dinner with six former students now in college. She said she came away as proud as if she were their mother. Compared with a feeling like that, she said, the stress of budget problems fades away.

“I really can’t let any of the problems affect the way I feel about teaching,” said Watkins, who teaches fifth grade at William T. Newland Elementary School in Huntington Beach. “I teach because I love to do it. As the teacher, you are the mother, the counselor, the person who makes a difference.”

That is talk that Linda Oliver and thousands of other schoolteachers understand, despite the difficulties they confront.

“I see each of my kids as important and special,” she said. “I treat them as if they were my own kids. I just love those kids.”