Laguna Unified, Teachers Union Keep Bargaining

Negotiators for the Laguna Beach Unified School District and its teachers worked from Friday morning into the night trying to reach agreement on a teacher pay cut, which would be a major step in solving the district’s financial crisis.

The administration is asking its 110 teachers to take a 5% cut, which would save $350,000.

The district has a deficit of about $1.3 million in its $13.3-million budget, a shortfall that must be resolved by Nov. 30 to avoid a county takeover of the district’s finances. School officials have said they must borrow $800,000 and implement across-the-board pay cuts totaling nearly $500,000 to solve the problem. Salaries account for more than 85% of the district’s spending.

Last week, classified and nonunion workers, including the principals at all four district schools, agreed to take a 5% salary cut, and the district’s acting superintendent offered to relinquish 20% of his monthly pay to help resolve the crisis. The board accepted those offers Tuesday.

The cuts are retroactive to July 1, meaning that those who accepted 5% less actually will receive 7.5% less until the end of the year.

But negotiations with the teachers union had reached an impasse, and a mediator had been called in to help. Talks began again at 8 a.m. At 8 p.m., pizzas and Cokes were delivered and talks continued for hours.

David Slevcov, president of the teachers union, said he has been interviewing teachers from all of the schools to learn their feelings on the issue.

“We will not present something to our people that we can’t believe in,” he said Friday night.

School officials have said they cannot move forward with their plans to borrow money until they have all the salary cuts in place. The county will only approve the borrowing if it can be assured that the district has cut expenses to the point that it will be able to repay the loan.

If the district goes through the process of mediation and fact-finding with the teachers union, it could unilaterally impose the teacher pay cut. That process, however, would stretch beyond the Nov. 30 deadline.

The county has rejected the district’s budget for the current fiscal year, a first for any school district in Orange County. If the budget is not balanced by the end of the month, the county will appoint a fiscal advisor who will have the final say in the district’s financial matters. The elected trustees still would be considered the governing board.

Earlier this week, acting Supt. Jackson E. Parham said it is unlikely the county will intervene if the district and the Laguna Beach Unified Faculty Assn. reach a timely agreement.

The district has been consumed with a fiscal crisis that peaked in the summer and has had a ripple effect. Since August, the financial director was fired and the superintendent took an early retirement. Two other top administrators took jobs elsewhere, although they said they were leaving for reasons unrelated to the financial uproar. Then, earlier this month, board President Jan Vickers was voted out of office.

Parham, an attorney who was formerly a union negotiator for the district, has been working as acting superintendent for the district since September. On Tuesday, the board voted to take the preliminary steps to begin a search for a permanent superintendent.

The district’s financial woes stem from a variety of factors, including a drop in property tax revenue and, to a lesser degree, losses incurred in the 1993 firestorm and the county’s bankruptcy. Laguna Beach Unified is the only school district in Orange County that is dependent on property tax revenue, rather than on attendance-based state funding.

Recently, a three-man “budget review committee” from the state visited Laguna Beach and interviewed board members, administrators, office workers, teachers and parents to gain insight into how the district wound up in this financial mess and to consider ways to prevent a similar occurrence in the future. The committee’s report is expected next week.