L.A. District Scrambles Amid Teacher Shortage : Schools: Valley campuses close gap by hiring emergency-credentialed instructors.

An airline worker whose company folded. A laid-off engineer. A down-on-his-luck real estate agent. These victims of California’s battered economy and scores of others like them have been crowding offices at the Los Angeles Unified School District for a week, hoping to land new jobs as public school teachers.

Stable work, a starting salary of $26,000 a year, medical benefits and the chance to help children were enough of a lure for many of these unemployed, college-educated professionals, despite a bitter teachers union dispute that racked the district last year, ending with an unprecedented 10% pay cut and morale at an all-time low.

Tom Cody, who was hired Monday to teach fifth grade at Blythe Street School in Reseda, said he decided to take the plunge into teaching after losing his job as an operations manager with Eastern Airlines, which folded in 1991. He could not find satisfaction in another airline-related job.

“I’m extremely nervous. I’m shaking in my boots. I’ve never done the academic part of teaching. I thought now I could get paid for what I have been doing on a volunteer basis with coaching (sports),” Cody said.

“This is about economics,” said Garry Holm, 34, a former real estate agent hit hard by the plummeting Southern California housing market. “I’m basically unemployed. For me, anything is good. . . . Even though there are problems with the school district, it is still better than where I came from.”

Every new teacher like Holm--who will teach fifth grade--fills the void left by a more experienced teacher. With the opening of the fall semester Tuesday, the district has been scrambling to fill 650 to 700 vacancies, more than it has had in the past 10 years, officials said.

About half the teachers being hired have little or no classroom experience and have qualified for a position with emergency credentials, which require a bachelor’s degree and passing state and federal skills tests and medical exams. In addition to those requirements, teachers with full credentials have taken a fifth year of college, including training in teaching methods.

United Teachers-Los Angeles President Helen Bernstein, who publicly predicted a massive “brain drain” of teachers last spring, criticized the district for its lack of foresight on teacher flight.

“An emergency credentialed teacher is like an emergency credentialed surgeon. I don’t know anyone who wants to be cut open by a person like that,” Bernstein said. “I suppose to someone who is unemployed, teaching is better than nothing. But that is some young person’s life who is being put in their hands.”

Assistant Supt. Irene Yamahara, head of the personnel division, said Tuesday that the district, with a teaching force of about 32,000, is in a constant hiring mode. She added that even though the office is unusually busy this fall, the last-minute rush to hire teachers is typical of the beginning of any school year.

School officials have provided substitute teachers so that no classrooms are without supervision. By the end of business Tuesday, the district had offered 961 teacher contracts, but it was not known how many would be accepted. District officials said they believe that all elementary school openings have been filled.

This fall, Yamahara said, “there is a whole series of problems at work. It’s not just the pay cut. . . . Teachers are leaving the city because of crime and violence. As a city, as a school district, we need to improve our image. . . . Things are catching up with us.”

Furthermore, teacher recruiting efforts have been scaled back because of budget cuts, Yamahara said. The district offers several programs to train teachers, but the demand cannot be met in all areas.

More than half the vacancies are in the hardest-to-fill areas: special education, bilingual education, math and science. Teachers with these credentials are in such high demand that they can find a job virtually anywhere in the state.

Hiring emergency credentialed teachers is “not by any means our first priority” said Michael Acosta, head of teacher employment. “But when we are short of full credentialed teachers we have few other options. . . . There is an emergency situation and we must have emergency teachers.”

At Gledhill Street School in North Hills, Principal Janice Walsh was searching for someone to fill a last-minute vacancy created when a teacher took a position on another campus.

“I have 28 little bodies that need to be taken care of,” Walsh said of the combination third- and fourth-grade class taught by the departing instructor, who will stay until a replacement can be found. “There are people out there--it’s just finding the right person for the right place.”

She has interviewed two applicants for the post and has a lead on a third. Constraining her options, however, are federal regulations that require minority representation on school faculties, an issue important in the Los Angeles district, which serves an 87% minority student population.

At George K. Porter Middle School in Granada Hills, Principal Sherry Breskin made a special effort to recruit minority teachers at the end of the last school year and over the summer. Because the school lost its ninth-graders this year and added sixth-graders, Breskin knew she would have an extraordinary amount of hiring this fall in the face of a potential dearth of teachers districtwide.

“I deliberately worked summer school so I could be hiring the last three weeks of summer school,” Breskin said. “I worked like a demon. I hired 17 teachers”--more than a quarter of Porter’s 66-member faculty.

Eleven of Breskin’s new teachers are minorities. Only one position is still outstanding.

To close the teacher gap, the district is also making use of interns who staff classrooms as full-time instructors as they work toward permanent credentials.

Artist Adela McAdams just joined the faculty at Nestle Avenue School in Tarzana, where she has begun teaching a combination fourth- and fifth-grade class. After a weekend spent applying a fresh coat of paint to her classroom, McAdams said Tuesday that she entered her new job with her eyes open, aware that dissatisfaction and anger had already driven away an increasing number of veteran teachers in the district.

“I hear of the horrible things that are happening,” she said. “But I think if you take the initiative, you can make a difference in a few things.

“I’m the eternal optimist. There’s always a silver lining in every cloud. I think we can turn it around if we have patience.”

Nancy Cohen of Sherman Oaks, a mother of two children enrolled in the district, said that she wants her youngsters to be assigned to a qualified and experienced teacher and expressed concern that hastily hiring teachers may not yield the best candidates.

“Some teachers who are not experienced are excellent. But I hope people are not just teaching because they need a job,” Cohen said. “I want them to teach because they love children.”

A newspaper advertisement prompted Maria Schneider, 28, to give up her hopes of finding a teaching job at a college and take on a class of second-graders.

“There aren’t many jobs for professors, but there are plenty for teachers,” said Schneider, who is bilingual in Spanish.

Another teacher, Elaine Bienenfeld, 65, is a double statistic. She retired in June, disgusted with the 10% pay cut. She was rehired Tuesday as a substitute teacher, filling a sorely needed special education position at North Hollywood High School.

“I said the hell with this and I quit,” Bienenfeld recalled. She said she was drawn back to the classroom because she is devoted to her students. “But now I am working on my own terms,” she added.

For the 700 new teachers standing at the head of the class for the first time this fall, Bernstein, a veteran high school history instructor, offered this advice:

“Believe me, the people standing in that line at the district are going to be in for a big shock. For anyone to assume they can walk off the street and the next day be a classroom teacher, they are absolutely fooling themselves. My first advice to those people is to find another job.”

* SCHOOL SHOOTING: A 15-year-old boy is critically wounded at Dorsey High. B9