Classes, Budgets Feel Impact of Teacher Retirement : Education: Twenty-two are leaving the Conejo Valley district, making room for younger, lower-paid instructors. But Simi Valley’s labor dispute is causing many to defer the decision.

When the doors closed at Westlake Elementary School this month, Nadine Hiatt, 62, left behind a 28-year teaching career. For her, retirement will mean a chance to spend more time gardening, baking cookies and visiting grandchildren.

For east Ventura County school districts and their students, however, this year’s round of retirements carries a heavy load of educational and financial consequences.

In Thousand Oaks, the retirement of 22 teachers, along with additional departures for other reasons, will make room for about 50 new, younger teachers in the Conejo Valley Unified School District, said Leean Nemeroff, assistant superintendent for personnel services.

In a district where the average age of teachers is 48, four years older than the state average, the retirements signal a generational transition that means that students will see teachers with more youthful energy and up-to-date ideas, but less of the classroom experience and wisdom that come with age, officials said.

The new teachers also make less money--barely more than half of what teachers at the top of the pay scale can bring home. That means savings for the school district, which will be spending less on teachers’ salaries in the next school year than it does now.

A few miles away in Simi Valley, the retirement issue is tangled in a bitter labor dispute that has teachers’ union leaders talking about a strike in September. As a result, only six teachers are retiring there this year, down from 20 the year before, Simi Valley Unified School District officials said.

That leaves the district financially pressed, as it continues to pay the salaries of teachers who have spent years climbing to the top rung of the pay scale.

The Oak Park and Moorpark unified school districts each have only one teacher retiring, so the effects there are minimal.

In terms of its impact on the quality of classroom education, retirement is a “mixed bag,” Nemeroff said.

“Some of our absolute finest teachers are our most senior individuals,” Nemeroff said. On the other hand, she acknowledged, “some have not kept up to pace.”

Hiatt said some teachers do stick around too long. She does not count herself among them, however.

“I keep trying different things and new things,” Hiatt said. She said some of the more popular innovations can bother parents of siblings, who wonder why their younger child is getting the chance to do something in class that the older child did not.

Hiatt, her instincts honed by years of dealing with kindergarten students, said she is a better teacher now than she was when she started.

She and her friend Lou Kirby, 62, a second-grade teacher at Westlake who is also retiring, share a long historical perspective. They recall the days when students went home after school instead of to day care, when students read books or entertained themselves rather than being shuttled between a series of ballet and karate lessons.

“The children are a lot less innocent than they used to be,” Kirby said.

Still, Hiatt and Kirby said they feel good about turning their classrooms over to a new generation. They both have supervised student teacher interns, and were impressed with what they saw.

“These new teachers coming out of college--they’re real dynamos,” Kirby said. “Those who go into it now are really dedicated.”

Hiatt said many women of her generation became teachers almost by default. “You could be a nurse, you could be a teacher--or you could be nothing like Mama,” she said. The new teachers are forgoing more lucrative careers because they really want to work in the schools, she said.

To district administrators, these new teachers are attractive--not just for their energy, but because they work for almost half the price of a teacher with 25 years of experience.

“You do save money,” said Leon Mattingley, assistant superintendent for personnel services and employee relations in the Simi Valley schools. He said teachers who start work in Simi Valley right out of school are paid about $27,000 a year, while those with five years experience in another district earn about $34,000.

Teachers with 25 years experience in Simi Valley hit the top of the pay scale at $51,494 a year, Mattingley said--and the district has 168 of them.

The Simi Educators Assn., whose members have worked without a contract for almost a year, says the district could save money by encouraging older teachers to retire early. The district would do that by offering teachers a “golden handshake” consisting of a cash bonus or health insurance. The savings could be used to raise the base pay of teachers, or it could have helped the district reduce a feared three-year, $6-million budget deficit.

But Mattingley said offering golden handshakes every year might reduce their effectiveness during the years when they are really needed. “Then it doesn’t become an incentive, it becomes an entitlement,” he said. “If you offer it as needed, it becomes more of an incentive.”

Union president Ron Myren does not buy that argument. “I think it’s all wet,” he said. He said he knows of at least 20 or 30 teachers who are ready to retire if the district offers an incentive, as it did a year ago.

Without the incentive, he said, “teachers aren’t retiring, which ends up being more costly to the district.”

The issue was under discussion in Simi Valley contract negotiations before the talks broke down this spring. And Nemeroff says she also expects retirement to come up for discussion in talks scheduled to begin in August between the Conejo Valley teachers’ union and the district.

In both districts, there are millions of dollars at stake. The 1995-96 budget for the Conejo Valley Unified School District includes $32.5 million for teacher salaries. That is down from $33 million budgeted the year before because of the 22 retirements and departures for other reasons. In Simi Valley, the scarcity of retirements is one reason that the district has budgeted $33.1 million for teacher salaries in 1995-96, up from $32.2 million the year before.

And, as Hiatt’s case shows, all the talk of bargaining points and budget lines in district headquarters conference rooms and at school board meetings actually has an effect on what goes on in classrooms.

Hiatt said an incentive program that allows her to keep her health insurance benefits until age 65 was an important factor in her decision to retire.

But personal reasons continue to play a role, as well.

“A retirement depends on the individual,” said Mattingley, the Simi Valley assistant superintendent. “It’s not an easy thing to do, to separate from your career. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what’s available to them, they just go and retire.”

Hiatt said she is looking forward to spending time in her garden and with her two grandchildren. She also needs to take care of her mother and mother-in-law.

For Kirby, the decision was also a personal one. She said she went back to work originally to pay for braces on her children’s teeth. Her youngest child has finished college. “Now,” she said, “it’s time to play.”