Schools : Creation of District-Level Athletics Post Irks Teachers : Sports: They criticize the $50,000-a-year South Pasadena job, saying it comes at the expense of much-needed instructors. Board defends its action.

A decision by the South Pasadena School Board to create a $50,000-a-year, full-time athletic directorship has raised the ire of teachers who say the position is unnecessary and will take up funding desperately needed for classroom teachers.

“It’s not in our interest to have a new management position created,” Pat Hawkins, president of the teachers’ association, told the board last week. “Because of the financial straits we’ve been in the past few years, there’s not enough money to create a management position that a teacher has already been handling.”

The athletic director will administer all competitive sports in the district, work out scheduling, determine eligibility of athletes and serve as a liaison between athletes and teachers.

Pasadena High School teacher Jim Yang has performed those duties for 23 years in a part-time post that pays a stipend of $2,700 a year.

Yang said he knows of no other district in the California Interscholastic Federation’s southern district that has a full-time administrator for extracurricular sports programs.

“I don’t know what that guy is going to do all day,” Yang said. “We’re in dire need of teachers. Our math class is overcrowded. Our English teacher is overworked. Where they got that $50,000 is a mystery.”

Yang said he was not consulted about the new position before job announcements were posted, and will not be eligible to apply for it, because he does not have the administrative credential the job requires.

Board member Pat Martinez-Miller said the new position will expand the responsibilities that Yang has handled.

“There will be some aspects of the job he didn’t do: more liaison with school groups, a more visible presence with coach supervision and hiring,” she said. “His interpretation of what his job actually entails and what we would like it to be are not congruent. And he was right. The job the way he was doing it was not a full-time job.”

Over the past few years, Hawkins said, the district has cut positions in the music, physical education, library and custodial departments.

“It has been the priority to reinstate the cuts before creating new positions,” she said.

South Pasadena Supt. Leslie Adelson said the cutbacks Hawkins referred to were several years old, and stressed that while music or gym teachers’ positions were eliminated, no academic teaching positions were cut.

While the policy calls for reinstating frozen positions before creating new ones, Adelson said, the district determined that the athletic director was needed first.