District-Teacher Talks Leave Brown Hopeful

Los Angeles Unified School District and teachers union officials emerged Saturday from their first joint negotiations in two months without a contract settlement, but Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, acting as mediator, said he is increasingly optimistic that a strike can be averted.

“I’ve got to tell you that I am more optimistic now than I have ever been,” said Brown after a three-hour meeting in his Los Angeles office. “I think it went very well. . . . It was not tense at all. As a matter of fact, it was as friendly as two adversaries can be.”

Top district and union leaders viewed the session as a critical meeting because the two sides have not spoken to each other in more than two months. With 28,000 teachers poised to strike the nation’s second-largest school district in nine days, both sides are aggressively gearing up for a walkout while hoping for a settlement.

United Teachers-Los Angeles President Helen Bernstein said she is prepared to put any proposal forged through the mediation with Brown to the vote of the union membership.

Brown, who has ordered both sides not to publicly discuss the sessions, said “we are addressing” the district’s 12% teacher pay cut--which prompted the threat of a Feb. 23 strike--but said he did not know whether it will be reduced.

The Los Angeles school board imposed pay cuts on all 58,000 employees in October to help make up an unprecedented $400-million budget deficit.

Brown on Saturday gave the first indication of how he will address another issue critical to the teachers union: a district guarantee that salaries will not be cut again next year. Brown said he is working to draft a provision that both sides will trust.

“The district has long since indicated they have no intention of cutting salaries (next year),” Brown said. “We just have to find the right way to have that said so that everyone believes it.”

The district’s last offer to the teachers stated that salaries would not be reduced again next year only if state education funding remained at current levels.

Gov. Pete Wilson’s 1993-94 budget proposal maintains the same funding as this year. Since the January release of the budget, however, Los Angeles school district officials have been unwilling to make a contractual guarantee to teachers, fearing that the state’s persistent recession may ultimately move lawmakers to reduce education funds.

Brown said that he “absolutely believes that the state of California will provide a minimum of the same dollar figures” for education because the governor and most members of the Legislature are committed to it.

In a move that may ultimately appease both sides, Brown said that before a guarantee can be made by the district, “there clearly has to be a dispute mechanism designed so that if all hell breaks lose and in fact those dollars are not there” both sides can work out the issue. He said such a disagreement “clearly has to be worked out with me.”

Still uncertain is how a new contract might deal with the union’s other goal: forcing the district to give more decision-making authority to teachers. A major theme of discontent among teachers is that their profession is not respected by an administration that imposes burdensome rules on how to teach.

“Those things may not be totally possible to achieve in a contract written to avoid a strike,” Brown said Saturday.

Supt. Sid Thompson and school board President Leticia Quezada represented the district Saturday. Four union leaders attended: Bernstein; Day Higuchi, vice president; Bill Lambert, director of governmental relations, and Inola Henry, chairwoman of the union’s political action committee.

The groups faced off at opposite ends of a conference table at 9:30 a.m., with Brown at the head. The meeting broke up shortly after noon, with the participants laughing and smiling as they opened the door.

The negotiators swiftly left the building without comment, while Brown fielded questions.

He said he does not want the two sides publicly talking about the session because of their tendency to speak to their constituencies through the media. For example, he said, Quezada or Bernstein could say something that would anger board or union members, compromising their ability to freely negotiate.

Before the session, both sides appeared anxious and did little more that greet each other in the hallway before entering the conference room.

“I have a decent feeling about this, but it takes two to cause things to happen,” Thompson said.

Bernstein declined to say how she was willing to compromise.

“It’s not a matter of where we are willing to give,” she said. “It’s a matter of taking a package to the membership to decide.”

Brown said that once behind closed doors, he was surprised by the friendliness between two sides that “weren’t even speaking the same language” when he first began talking separately with them in December.