Principals in Valley Brace for Strike Vote : Schools: Administrators make plans for handling the students if the instructors walk out. The union is fighting a 9% pay cut proposed by the district.

Diane Agliam cut her teeth as an assistant principal during the 1989 teachers strike that virtually paralyzed the Los Angeles school system.

Thrust suddenly into an auditorium with scores of unsupervised children, Agliam responded by drawing up lesson plans that kept students in line while continuing their education for nine hectic days.

Three years later, as instructors gear up to vote on another work stoppage over proposed pay cuts, Agliam, now principal of Glenwood Elementary School in Sun Valley, is glad she saved those lesson plans and is ready to dust them off if teachers elect to walk out.

Across the Los Angeles Unified School District, administrators like Agliam are hoping for the best but bracing for the worst in a school year that has already spawned the worst fiscal crisis in district history. In the past two months, hundreds of students have staged protests, and teachers have launched an aggressive campaign to deflect the budget ax from their paychecks.

To help close a $400-million budget shortfall, the Board of Education is seeking to slash teacher salaries this year by 9% on top of a 3% cut imposed last year--part of a proposed graduated scale of pay reductions for nearly all of the district’s 58,000 employees.

The teachers union has rejected the cut and will ballot its 28,000 members Tuesday and Wednesday on whether they will authorize union leaders to call a strike if salary negotiations deadlock.

For principals, many say it is not too soon to begin planning for a possible job action by teachers, particularly for the problems that would be posed by the presence of hundreds--if not thousands--of students with few adults to keep tabs on them. Safety, they say, is the primary concern.

“You have to start thinking ahead,” said Patricia Abney, who heads Hazeltine Avenue Elementary School in Van Nuys. “You have to start thinking about how you would supervise the number of children who would be reporting. . . . You’re not thinking so much of instruction but of management and care.”

Although some parents may choose to pay for baby-sitters during a strike rather than send their children to a school with reduced or no adult supervision, Abney said, many of the 1,200 students at Hazeltine Avenue come from lower-income families who cannot afford child care even for a day. For those pupils, the school is still obligated to provide services.

“You can’t just send children home, and even if you wanted to, there are some children who can’t,” said Sarah Berry, principal at Castlebay Lane Elementary School in Northridge. “So we prepare activities for large groups, like music lessons. You try to do some academically related things, but you know that, working with a large group, . . . you’re not going to be able to do the teaching that you normally do.”

Berry said she has already begun preparing possible lessons that can be used by educators and volunteers, particularly activities that do not require extensive use of materials such as books, which may not be available for so many children simultaneously.

For example, as she did in 1989, Berry is crafting creative writing exercises that can be assigned after she reads aloud a story, or simple science lessons she can introduce by taking children outside to observe various sights and sounds. School videotapes based on classroom curriculum also come in handy.

“It’s very important to have those contingency plans together ahead of time and materials to use in them.” She said she spent many hours the weekend before the 1989 strike “burning the midnight oil so that I would have all that prepared.” Berry also stressed the need to have flexibility in a volatile situation and a number of backup plans.

At Monroe High School in North Hills in 1989, nearly the entire faculty participated in the strike, leaving Principal Joan Elam and a dozen other adults to cope with a campus of 2,500 teen-agers--some of whom joined their instructors on the picket line or hopped the fence and took off.

“You can’t be all places at once when you have 15 people on the grounds,” she said.

She assembled students each morning to tell them of the various learning stations set up around campus.

“Is it a Band-Aid? Very definitely. We have a fantastic faculty here, and there’s no way that I can equal what they do.”

Many principals acknowledge that it is very difficult to gauge just how many staff members will walk out and how many will cross the picket lines in order to determine the level of extra supervision needed. They also note that a “yes” vote this week may not necessarily translate into an actual walkout by some teachers who are already battered by the recession and unable to afford the loss in pay they would suffer by going on strike.

“A number of teachers have said to me, ‘Diane, I want you to know that I would be supportive of a job action, but I can’t do that because of the economic times,’ ” Agliam said.

The district overall has not yet mobilized in expectation of a strike. But Assistant Supt. Sara A. Coughlin, who oversees the San Fernando Valley’s elementary schools, said the materials used in 1989 are still readily available for administrators if teachers approve a strike this year.

And administrators who worked through the job action three years ago will most likely have kept their copy of a typewritten “Principal’s Work Stoppage Manual” issued to all principals a few days before the strike.

The 50-plus-page “confidential” guide instructs principals on how to marshal volunteers and available teachers effectively to watch over students, how to persuade strikers to return to work and how to secure “alternative sources of vital goods and services, including strike replacements.”

The manual also makes suggestions on how to keep track of day-to-day tasks, such as monitoring classroom keys and supplies, and furnishes principals with form letters in various languages that they can use to inform parents of the daily situation on campus.

Administrators are advised not to meet with striking teachers to avoid the appearance of personal bargaining. In addition, the guide warns principals against getting provoked by picketers and against “bad-mouthing” the teachers union, which could open the district to charges of unfair labor practices.

Just as important, the manual gives advice on how to resume normal operations and maintain staff morale when the work stoppage ends. Several principals say that the scars left by a strike--particularly the ill will between those teachers who walked out and those who stayed--often do not heal easily.

“The feelings they have, the animosity, stays on for months, for years,” said Principal Henry Gradillas of Birmingham High School in Van Nuys. Gradillas anticipates that perhaps half of his faculty would join a strike, leaving the others to deal with 3,000 teen-agers.

Judy Burton, who now heads Hart Street Elementary School in Canoga Park, remembers how the 1989 job action destroyed the relationship between two women at her former school who had been “the best of friends for years.”

“One crossed and one didn’t, and they were never able to rekindle their professional and personal relationship,” she said.

She and others agree that the principal plays a key role in patching the school back together. Berry says that one of the keys for her in re-establishing a sense of normalcy at Castlebay Lane was to “refrain from making any judgment on who stays in and who goes out”--a policy also endorsed by the principals’ work stoppage guide.

“While I personally don’t agree with having a strike, I’m not making any personal judgment” on the teachers who participate, Berry said. “My whole goal for the school is that we do a good job teaching the children. The children must come first.”

“The principal has to take the leadership role of getting things back to business--not belaboring what happened, not making it an issue in terms of what goes on . . . after it’s over,” added Burton at Hart Street.

“It’s important for the community, the students and the teachers to see as soon as possible that you’re going to go back to focusing on instruction for the kids. And that’s not easy.”