Two-Thirds of Compton Teachers Stage Sickout in Labor Dispute

Nearly two-thirds of Compton Unified School District teachers called in sick Tuesday to show support for their union in contract negotiations, but schools remained open.

The sickout came just before the final scheduled mediation session involving the Compton Education Assn. and district officials, set for today. Teachers have not received a raise in five years and have been working without a contract since June 1995.

According to district estimates, about 680 teachers, or 64% of the faculty, took the day off as part of the demonstration. District officials also reported an above-average level of student absences.

Despite the sickout, every school in the 28,000-student district was open Tuesday and operating under emergency plans that called for substitute teachers and certificated administrators to run classes, said district spokeswoman Christine Sanchez.

“The kids were not sent home,” she said. “They were assigned to classrooms, and administrators and substitute teachers reported in.” Sanchez said the job action “did not catch us by surprise.”

While the rules of the bargaining process bar the union from officially sanctioning any job actions during negotiations, Compton Education Assn. President Harold A. Stone said, “We didn’t discourage it either.” He added that he expects teachers to go back to work today.

Talks between the union, which has more than 1,000 members, and the district began in February 1995, a few months before the last contract expired in June. If the bargaining meeting today ends without an agreement, the union probably will seek authority from the mediator to strike, Stone said.

In mediation, teachers have demanded a one-year contract with a 5% raise and improvements in classroom working conditions. Negotiators reached an impasse earlier this month, however, and teachers at some of the district’s 33 schools began picketing before class Friday, Stone said.

The increasingly bitter talks have reached the boiling point against the backdrop of the district’s struggle to pull itself out of financial and academic doldrums. State lawmakers voted to take over the district, strip the school board of its authority and appoint an administrator to oversee the school system in 1993 after loaning the district $20 million.

Waves of teacher resignations and retirements over the last five years have sliced into the district faculty, one-third of which is composed of teachers with “emergency credentials”--temporary permits granted before a teacher has passed the district’s required training.

Under the existing pay schedule, the median teacher salary in Compton is $36,000, which does not measure up to that of neighboring districts, Stone said.

“We’re not going to attract new teachers with that kind of salary,” he said.

At many of the district’s campuses, officials attributed Tuesday’s increase in student absences to the storms sweeping through the area, Supt. Harold Cebrun said in a statement. “However, many students, despite the weather, came to school this morning. . . . We missed our teachers, and we hope they’ll return to work tomorrow because we need them.”

At Theodore Roosevelt Elementary, administrators had to gather students in the cafeteria to take attendance, and parents who had driven to the school to drop off their children stayed to help, said Dolores Bell, the school’s community liaison. Holding regular classes proved difficult.

“They did a lot of art in class today,” she said of the children.