Brown to Offer Own Proposal to Try to Settle Teacher Dispute : Schools: With a scheduled walkout five days away, a daylong negotiation session makes little progress.

After a daylong negotiation session that failed to produce an agreement, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown said Thursday that he will offer his own proposal to settle the protracted dispute between the Los Angeles school district and its teachers union before next week’s strike deadline.

“Clearly, before next Monday, regardless of what occurs in the room and their discussion, I will obviously offer a proposal,” said Brown, who is mediating the dispute. He said it “may have been just as easy to resolve the dispute between Iran and Iraq” when asked about the rift between the two sides.

Talks are scheduled to resume with Brown at 4 p.m. today at Brown’s Los Angeles office.

United Teachers-Los Angeles President Helen Bernstein emerged from the eight-hour meeting saying that no agreements have been reached on any issue and that planning for next Tuesday’s strike remains in high gear.

“We worked very hard and we talked about a lot of issues, and it was about as serious as we have been,” Bernstein said. “We are not close because we haven’t agreed on anything.”

She has promised the union’s 27,000 members that she will put to a vote any new offer forged through the Brown mediation.

School board President Leticia Quezada said she and Supt. Sid Thompson are committed to continuing talks until a settlement is forged.

Brown, who as Speaker wields power second only to the governor, said he is almost certain he would not have agreed to be mediator if he had known how much time it was going to take.

He said the gulf separating the district and the union is most evident in the way they present basic information. There is a “clear lack of identical facts for identical situations, identical language for identical situations,” he said.

The session--the third face-to-face meeting between district and union negotiators in six days--came as thousands of teachers throughout the district took to the sidewalks early Thursday morning, conducting informational picketing to inform parents and students about the possibility of a strike. The teachers handed out leaflets announcing the airing of a union-produced television show Sunday that portrays the teaching profession sympathetically.

The critical discussions being mediated by Brown center on whether a 12% teacher pay cut can be reduced. The district imposed varying degrees of pay cuts on all employees last October to help cover an unprecedented $400-million budget deficit.

Brown said Thursday that he did not yet know whether the pay cut can be reduced.

The union is grasping for ways to ease the cut, but negotiations are hamstrung by controversial protection agreements that the district has made with other unions.

Brown has voiced disapproval of the agreements, saying that they have “very, very much so” complicated the talks. The agreements prohibit the district from giving teachers a better deal than other unions and forces it to extend any salary or benefits enhancement to all employees, a provision that could make the cost of reducing the salary cut prohibitive.

The so-called “me-too” agreements also bar the district from laying off other employees--including principals and clerical, food service and janitorial workers--to generate the savings needed to sweeten the package for teachers.

Me-too clauses are a staple of labor negotiations, often used by management to entice unions to sign contracts early by assuring that unions that hold out will not get a better deal.

In the school district, seven employee unions sought the clauses early in the negotiations last fall to protect their members from layoffs and deeper pay cuts they feared could result if the powerful teachers union won better contract terms.

School board members were torn over whether to issue the guarantees, but the unions would not settle and accept their pay cuts without the pledge.

Brown was meeting with the other unions late Thursday night.

In order to reduce the salary cut by even 1%, the district must come up with $20 million, Thompson said.

For the cash-strapped district, which spends 87% of its budget on salaries and benefits, the only alternatives would be to dip into educational program funds or lay off administrators not covered by the me-too clauses.

Even Bernstein acknowledges that finding that amount of money is difficult.

“All we can do is try to squeeze out every single penny we can find,” she told a group of teachers union representatives at a Wednesday night meeting. “All the money is already designated for something else. There is not a pot that says ‘reserve cash.’ ”

Already, the district faces the prospect of starting the next school year $100 million in the red, because it must repay money borrowed from its insurance fund to get through this year and absorb inflationary costs of such things as utilities and gasoline without help from the state.

Bernstein said Thursday that she is solidly against increasing class size as a way to save money. Already, the district has reached state-mandated limits on the size of elementary school classes. And one of the major complaints from teachers is their inability to offer high-quality education in crowded classrooms.

When asked at the Wednesday meeting if a new contract proposal might not include a reduction in the 12% salary cut, Bernstein responded: “If there is a proposal that has anything new, even if it does not affect the 12%, I’m going to let you vote on it.”

Also of prime importance to the union is a district guarantee that salaries will not be cut again next year. Brown has said language was being drafted to make such an assurance but no agreement has been reached.

Bernstein has told her rank-and-file members that the union is also seeking an active role in a management audit that the district intends to undertake. She said the union has proposed hiring a union auditor “to shadow” the district’s hired firm to ensure that the audit is fairly conducted.

“We are saying it doesn’t mean anything unless we are part of that audit,” she said, “unless we read the contract, approve the contract, unless we are involved on a weekly basis with a review.”

Although the district cut medical benefits for all employees, giving them fewer options for selecting the type of coverage, Bernstein said that it is not in the union’s best interest to work out better benefits within a new contract. She said that even among rank-and-file members there is not clear consensus on what type of coverage would be best.

Instead, she said, the union would consider taking over administration of medical benefits.

Times education writer Sandy Banks contributed to this story.