2 Sides Talk Peace but Gird for War if Teachers Strike

Teachers are spending their vacation hunched over phones in the “war room” at union headquarters, rattling instructions to the rank and file. Los Angeles police are readying a citywide emergency operations control center to dispatch officers to campus trouble spots. School district officials are preparing to shuttle wary substitute teachers through picket lines onto schoolyards.

Eleven days from now, more than 28,000 teachers, counselors and nurses are scheduled to walk off their jobs in a strike that could paralyze the giant Los Angeles Unified School District.

The potential for a strike has both sides operating on dual tracks--they are seeking ways to reach an agreement while frenetically stepping up plans to cope with the confusion of a massive walkout in the nation’s second-largest school district.

On one path, their plans call for maintaining safety and supervision for students and employees despite an atmosphere charged with anger and hostility and a city crackling with racial tensions.

This weekend, the district will run a newspaper ad seeking thousands of substitute teachers. Los Angeles police officers trained in calming laboring disputes are conducting workshops for teachers on how to picket peacefully. Worried parents are banding together to offer day care to children who might be left unsupervised at school.

On the other path, they are preparing for a critical meeting Saturday with Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who is mediating the dispute. He will bring both sides together at his Los Angeles office for their first face-to-face session in months. In anticipation of the meeting, both the union and the district were expressing cautious optimism that a strike can be avoided.

“I do not believe there will be a strike,” said school board President Leticia Quezada, declining to offer specific reasons. “It’s my best judgment guess. Many others disagree with me, but as an optimist that is my opinion.”

United Teachers-Los Angeles President Helen Bernstein said, “I think this could be settled in one day” if both sides agree to compromise.

Union officials have prepared for Brown a report that for the first time formally outlines their five or six top priorities to seal a deal. District officials have complained that the union has stalemated negotiations by refusing to present a formal response to the district’s last offer. That offer included a promise not to cut teachers’ salaries next year if state funding remains the same, along with a management audit of the district and a sick-pay incentive program.

The strike threat was prompted by the district’s decision in October to cut teachers’ pay 12% to help bridge a $400-million budget deficit. All employees have taken pay cuts.

As the strike deadline nears, rhetoric on both sides has toned down markedly.

Gone is the name-calling by Bernstein, who said in November that the district’s last contract offer was written by someone “who was probably on drugs” and who later staged a motor home camp-out at district headquarters to show a willingness to negotiate. District officials have stopped accusing union leadership of grandstanding and changing their demands from day to day.

Now, both sides are careful not to publicly snipe at each other--a change some attribute to Brown’s intervention. Brown, one of the state’s most powerful politicians, ordered the union and district not to publicly discuss the details of their mediation sessions.

Brown has revealed little of his strategy for bringing the two sides to agreement, but said he is convinced that both the union and district want to settle.

A strike, he said last week, “would be (so) devastating to individuals, as well as to the district and the organizations like the teachers union, that everybody seems to want to settle it.”

Both sides have expressed profound confidence in his ability to bring them together--one of the few points they have been able to agree on since the negotiations began six months ago.

Brown was criticized for his role in the unprecedented 63-day state budget stalemate last year that threatened the delivery of basic state services such as health care and forced thousands of state employees to bank with IOUs instead of paychecks. However, school and union officials in Los Angeles look favorably on Brown because he stood up for education funding, which was at the heart of the debate.

He is respected--even feared--by both sides in the school district dispute.

“I would say no one is going to take on Willie Brown. That would be suicide,” Supt. Sid Thompson said. “As far as I’m concerned (the district) has enough torpedoes coming. I don’t need any more of them.”

Although it is unlikely, Brown could promise to use his considerable influence to shield Los Angeles schools from further cuts in next year’s budget. This would allow the board to make the pledge the union seeks: That teacher pay will not be cut for a third straight year.

A more likely scenario is that Brown will offer a face-saving solution that will give both sides a graceful way out.

That could provide the “political cover” that would allow Bernstein to toss back to her membership an unpopular offer. Or it could mean putting together a package of non-monetary items that would improve teacher working conditions as a way of ameliorating the pain of their 12% pay cut. Or Brown could secure compromises from both sides so that neither will be seen as a loser.

Likewise, board members say they may be willing to back down on their demands if Brown says that is the only way to avoid a strike. “The board wants a way out,” said member Mark Slavkin. “And what (Brown) says in the end will go.”

Bernstein said this week that it is unlikely a new offer will contain monetary incentives that will “make people happy.” As boxes of newly printed union buttons proclaim, the union charge is that the district’s “priorities are upside down.” She said the contract must include provisions that give more decision-making authority to teachers.

She said teachers want a two-year contract because they are “stressed out and tired” by annual negotiations, along with control over staff and curriculum development at their schools and more budget control. On small but symbolic issues, teachers want coveted parking slots now reserved for administrators opened up to them. Among bigger issues, the union wants to be involved in the district management audit that will soon be undertaken.

“It’s all about making teachers a priority. It’s about the democratization of the school site,” she said.

Brown was asked to mediate the dispute by former legislator Mike Roos, a longtime friend who served with Brown in Sacramento. Roos now heads LEARN, a 2-year-old education reform group that has seen its own plans to overhaul the city’s schools threatened by the continuing labor strife and the growing movement to dismantle the district.

Indeed, on several fronts the contract talks have turned into a high-stakes game, with the very future of the school system hanging in the balance.

Three years of budget cuts have decimated campus services, and constant fighting between teachers and administrators has left the district’s public image in tatters; 61% of city residents interviewed in a recent Times poll said they believe the school system is mismanaged. Many in and outside the district fear that a strike would derail efforts to improve the system and hand ammunition to those trying to force reform by breaking the district apart.

“If we cannot settle, it becomes another part of the hopeless spin that folks tend to think we are in,” Thompson said. “We have to settle this and we have to convince this community we can sit down together and educate our kids.”

Complicating the situation is the tinderbox atmosphere in the city, with racial tensions simmering and the second trial under way for the four police officers accused of beating Rodney G. King.

Tensions erupted on several district campuses last fall, with fights breaking out between black and Latino students. The prospect of picket-line confrontations and 650 campuses with thousands of students and little supervision adds to the potential for violence.

That reality is not lost on board members or union leaders, providing perhaps their most potent motivation for settling.

“There’s no way you can have a strike that will not do great damage to this city, period,” said Slavkin. “You cannot be naive enough to think that in this environment you can create that degree of chaos and expect to mitigate it all and have it be a nice, smooth strike. It will inevitably be ugly, in spite of everyone’s best efforts.”

The Los Angeles Police Department is undertaking detailed mobilization plans for Feb. 23 that include establishing an emergency operations control center in the basement of City Hall. In addition, the school police will open a command center at district headquarters downtown.

LAPD Deputy Chief Bayon Lewis said the intent of the department is to maintain a low profile around school sites, remain a neutral party in the dispute and be prepared for the worst. To that end police are planning for heavy deployment for at least the first week of a strike, with an extra 1,000 additional patrol officers on duty.

Capt. Dan Schatz, head of the LAPD’s labor relations division, said police will not patrol school sites “in a massive show of uniform strength,” but will be prepared to respond in force to any outbreaks.

“The tensions in schools mirror those in the community,” Schatz said. “For that reason we are taking all precautions.”

He said the department has had “tremendous cooperation” from union and district officials. On Thursday, officers held a training session with 300 of the union’s picket captains who are responsible for keeping demonstrations orderly.

Teachers were instructed to keep moving and not block campus entrances or interfere with pedestrian or other traffic.

To further bolster their cause, union officials will take their case to the television airwaves two days before the scheduled strike. The union spent $30,000 to produce a half-hour, documentary-style program on KCBS Channel 2 in which teachers describe the difficulties of their jobs and students tell how good teachers made a difference in their lives. The air time cost $20,000 and the program will be shown even if the dispute is settled.

KCBS spokeswoman Carol Kinsey said that the station considers the show “issues advertising” and is prepared to sell time to opposing points of view. The district has no plans to buy television advertising, and Quezada declined to comment on the union show.

“Give us the material and give us the support our students need so we can do our job,” said one featured teacher. “I get frustrated when people say, ‘Oh, how nice of you, you are teaching in L.A.’ I’m not doing it as a charity, I’m doing it as a profession. I like it.”