Jury’s In on Teacher Equity Issue

When Los Angeles public school teachers are summoned for jury service, they are obligated to postpone this civic duty until their next scheduled vacation. If they served as first scheduled by the court, they would not--unlike most private-sector workers--be paid by their employer, due to a restriction in their collective bargaining agreement. So teachers perform jury duty on their own time--like the spring break now underway. Some vacation.

Most teachers who work for other school districts, and Los Angeles County and city employees, are given time off with pay during jury duty. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, nonteaching employees who work 12 months a year also get paid for jury service on grounds that they do not have as much time off as teachers.

What’s good for these LAUSD employees should be good for teachers too. Time off with pay is a negotiated item in the contract between the school district and the teachers union, and the give and take of collective bargaining is the best forum to address this issue.

All Americans have a duty to serve as jurors. Surely this obligation should not carry an intolerable penalty in lost time or pay.

Before the pay policy was changed about 20 years ago, teachers bore a heavy burden of jury duty because they were paid and thus were more often picked for trials than unpaid workers.

Certainly there are reasons to discourage teachers from taking any time off from classroom duties. Substitute teachers can be brought in, but in terms of the children’s education the subs can’t always pick up where the classroom teacher left off. School districts short of substitutes are under the greatest strain when it comes to teachers taking days off the job.

The additional expense of hiring subs is another factor. The subs each cost the district about $130 per day. Multiply by 10, the number of days that many jurors must serve, and you get a $1,300 debit for each teacher on jury duty. Now multiply that by the number of teachers summoned each year. The expense may not be a major concern in the current upbeat fiscal climate, but the good times won’t last forever.

All sectors of the work force should share jury duty, and teachers should be compensated just as are almost all other employees.