Brown Opens Talks on L.A. School Deadlock : Education: Speaker meets with Quezada and Thompson in first phase of effort to head off teachers strike. He will meet union leaders later this week.

Democratic Assembly Speaker Willie Brown met with Los Angeles school district officials Tuesday in the first of a series of sessions aimed at heading off a threatened teachers strike in February.

Brown met for two hours in his Capitol office with school board President Leticia Quezada and district Supt. Sid Thompson. A meeting with United Teachers-Los Angeles President Helen Bernstein and her top officers is scheduled in Sacramento Thursday morning.

“By next week I hope to have the two groups together,” Brown said after the meeting. “My goal is to reach an agreement before Feb. 22,” the date teachers will strike if they have not approved a new contract.

Thompson described the meeting as “cordial” and said he is “eternally hopeful” that an accord will be struck. He declined to provide details of the conversation, saying that he agreed not to publicly discuss the negotiations at Brown’s request.

During a news conference earlier in the day, Brown said he may ask two to five other members of the Assembly to join him on a strike mediation team. “I want people who are knowledgeable on education,” Brown said, adding they could include a Latino, an African-American and an Anglo woman.

“I may find it so overwhelming that I alone simply can’t do it.”

District and union negotiators, who have not met in formal sessions for more than a month, agreed in late December to ask Brown to help settle the contract dispute because he is viewed as a friend of education and a consummate negotiator.

“They indicated they had gone through a whole series of people and the only person that each of them agreed upon as equally offensive was me,” Brown quipped.

The dispute was sparked by deep pay cuts that the district imposed on teachers and other employees in October. To help bridge a $400-million deficit, the board imposed $178 million in salary reductions on all full-time employees. Teachers are earning 12% below what they were two years ago.

The Speaker said he is embarking on the mediation without a solution in mind.

“I intend to start from ground zero by calling in the various units one at a time, not putting them in one room together, and hearing their wildest descriptions of how awful the other fellow is and how right they are,” Brown said.

“Somewhere in between obviously will be an appropriate place to land for a recommended solution. I intend to do that, and I intend to build public consensus for what will be a proposed solution.”

Bernstein said Tuesday that she is hopeful the mediation will avert a strike.

“We want to be put in a position to have an environment set up so that a new offer can be hammered out,” Bernstein said. “The issues are pretty clear. We need a creative third idea.”

The biggest obstacle continues to be whether the district will guarantee that teacher salaries will not be cut again next year--a key union demand.

The district has promised that salaries will not be cut if state funding is kept even. Although Gov. Pete Wilson’s budget proposal last week keeps the level of per pupil spending at $4,187 for the next fiscal year, a majority of school board members maintain that guaranteeing the same salaries next year would be foolhardy given uncertainties in the state budget process.

“Whatever the Speaker proposes, the school board still has to agree to it. I will not agree to anything that puts a guarantee out there,” school board member Roberta Weintraub said Tuesday. “The (state) budget is the best-case scenario. We still don’t know what ax is going to swing.”

The mediation comes after the district presented in late November its so-called last and final offer, which included the conditional promise not to cut salaries next year and a district agreement to conduct a management audit. Last December, 78% of 21,000 teachers who voted rejected the contract and voted to go on strike Feb. 22 if a more acceptable offer is not made.

Bernstein has maintained that she wants to present a package of items to the membership to ease the pain of the pay cuts and was enraged that the district’s last offer did not include more incentives.

In recent interviews, Thompson and Bernstein both pointed fingers at the other for not presenting offers and counteroffers in writing, a critical step because it indicates the seriousness of the discussions.

“I’ve never had a written offer from UTLA. We need that base to form some kind of a package on,” Thompson said. “I have to assume that because UTLA hasn’t sent one, UTLA is not prepared at this time to make such a demand or make such an offer.”

Bernstein said that since September, the union has sent dozens of written proposals on issues including teacher seniority, an early retirement package and liberalizing teacher leave policies, but she said the district has not given a written answer.

“The answer always is, ‘We’ll get back to you,’ ” Bernstein said. “We are still waiting.”

She acknowledged that the union has not formally countered the district’s last offer, but said that is because she has not been given a clear idea of where the district stands on many of the items it has presented.

Gillam reported from Sacramento and Chavez from Los Angeles.