Response to Board Member’s Views on ABC Teachers Strike

As one of many striking ABC teachers who returned to the classroom to resume the joy of educating students, I was ecstatic to be back. Still stunned and hurt by the arrogantly cruel indifference of the four-member board majority to the welfare of the students, one of whom is my daughter, I thought the bitter battle was over.

The teachers and the community had won. Because we had bonded together in unprecedented electoral solidarity, we would have a new board that understood the obvious: Negotiating is a better board policy than deliberately and repeatedly mistreating teachers, parents and students with contemptuous disrespect.

True, my wife and I lost close to $4,000 in salary, our personal lives and the education of my daughter had been severely disrupted, and most important, the instructional program of my students has been damaged by nearly three weeks of bitter struggle. But now we could begin the healing of staff members callously turned against one another by the board majority and their administrators.

Then I saw in your newspaper a caustic letter from Robert Hughlett, one of the four board members who caused all the unnecessary damage in the first place.

Since he had misrepresented the concerns of the teachers to the community before, I probably should not have been so shocked. But his latest distortions were too much to bear in silence.

First of all, I attended all of the teachers’ midday and afternoon rallies and supported my colleagues by participating in picket lines at many different sites. Never once did I hear even the angriest teacher or the administrators report of even a single nail “strewn under the substitutes’ tires.” I did hear that sheriff’s deputies complained to striking teachers that district requests that they look for such incidents stupidly wasted their time. To claim as Hughlett did that this fantasy was a union tactic is at best self-delusion.

The Sheriff’s Department did inform teachers that they had every right to assemble on public school board property and voice political positions despite the board and district administration’s repeated efforts to deny citizens their constitutional rights. Any district secretary or support staff member who was “terrorized” by citizens exercising their constitutional rights needs to join the four misguided board members and the district administrators who caused the strike in the civics classes they disrupted.

Most slanderous was Hughlett’s totally unfounded insinuation that “tactics” included “children being told of imminent physical danger.” The citizens who overwhelmingly voted out of office Catherine Grant, a Hughlett colleague who helped cause the strike, know that teachers went on strike to protect students from an unnecessary increase in class size. They may not have heard parent complaints that district personnel working at sites refused to release to requesting parents their own children until after the school day ended.

Second, Hughlett’s feigned concern over the district’s fiscal condition is belied by his insistence on wasting money by forcing a strike that would never have happened had he voted to simply negotiate with teachers.

Finally, Hughlett ignores the responsible position always taken by the teachers and the union that represents them that they would abrogate any negotiated settlement that seriously threatened to cause the district any fiscal problem.

Hughlett’s effort to characterize the ABC teachers strike as a political ploy slanders every teacher who pleaded with him and the other three board members to negotiate and avoid the strike. Had he done so, there would have been no strike, Catherine Grant would probably still be a board member, and none of the ABC teachers, students and parents would have suffered the pain he caused them.

DENNIS J. COX

Mentor English Teacher

Cerritos High School