Trustees Agree to Terms of Teacher Pact

Orange Unified School District trustees have voted to accept the general terms of a contract settlement reached earlier this week with their teachers union.

The text of the contract has yet to be drafted, but the dispute that had parents, teachers and board members in an escalating state of crisis for a year appears to be over, officials said.

The agreement also ends speculation that as many as 300 of the district’s 1,200 teachers would flee the district. Union officials had asked teachers to withhold their Letters of Intent to Return, which commit them to their positions for one-year periods, as a sign of protest. Those letters are now flowing in, officials said, and the district should know by Monday how many teachers will return.

The three-year agreement, reached Thursday, raises teachers’ starting salaries, now the lowest in the county at $24,000, to more than $30,000, district administrators said.

Instructors will receive a 0.5% retroactive increase for the 1995-96 school year, another 3% raise for 1996-97 and increases of 2% to 9% for the coming year. The amount of increase depends on whether teachers opt for a voluntary buyout from their lifetime retirement health benefits program. Those who opt out will get up to $30,000 under the plan.

Negotiations for the 1998-99 school year are still ongoing.

School Board President Martin Jacobson said he is satisfied with the agreement because it reduces the burden of paying those lifetime health benefits, a cost that administrators have said could eventually bankrupt the district.

In turn, the district gave up on a multilevel salary schedule that teachers said was divisive.

“I think the union took a major step toward getting this thing settled,” Jacobson said.

Union President Suzanne Vaugine said both sides made major compromises. ‘It’s been a long year, a very long year,” she said. “I think it’s time to get on with it and move on to other issues,” she said.

The board is expected to ratify the written agreement at its July 10 meeting. Teachers will vote on it after Labor Day, school and union officials said.