Troubled District Hopes to Patch Things Up

This is a big week for Los Angeles County’s smallest unified school district.

Friday is the Sweetheart Dance, when heart-shaped decorations and dreamy love ballads will fill the auditorium at Vasquez High School.

That same day, officials of the Acton-Agua Dulce Unified School District and representatives of its teachers union will resume a far more delicate dance. With a constantly shifting tempo and changing partners, it has lasted longer than any sock hop marathon: most of the 1990s.

At times, one dancer has thrown a drink in the other’s face and stormed out. At others, they have drawn close enough to tie the knot.

The two sides express newfound optimism that they can negotiate a contract Friday for the district’s nearly 100 teachers. If not, union leaders have set a strike vote for Feb. 19.

Labor peace might be the best tonic for anxious residents of the unique district, a diverse, 200-square-mile band of sprawling luxury ranches and shabby trailer parks in the High Desert between Palmdale and Santa Clarita. Almost five years ago it became a unified district, opening a high school. Trouble--some participants prefer “growing pains”--has dogged it ever since.

Vasquez High and High Desert, the district’s middle school, still share a campus along a lonely stretch of the Antelope Valley Freeway. Temporary classrooms ring the modern, bright white main buildings that opened as the middle school in 1992. The main office is in a trailer.

“A lot of expectations weren’t met,” said Jim Duzick, president of the district’s board of trustees. “Any time people’s expectations are not met, you’re not going to have a lot of happy campers.”

A meeting of the schools’ board of trustees on Thursday night should help shape Friday’s contract talks. Board members are expected to decide the fate of Supt. Joseph Crawford, who the board placed on paid administrative leave Tuesday.

In a cautiously worded statement issued in part to quell community gossip, Acting Supt. Don Banderas said: “Allegations or rumors of any wrongdoing on the part of the superintendent are false. The board of trustees and Crawford continue to discuss future employment options.”

Board members and district officials decline to further discuss the move, saying it was a personnel decision made in a closed session. But union members and longtime residents say Crawford, who arrived in 1996, represents the biggest stumbling block in the impasse.

“The morale of the teachers is definitely up” because of Crawford’s suspension, said Grady Box, a negotiator with the California Teachers Assn., who runs a special crisis center for the teachers union at an Acton strip mall. Still, Box said the situation is the most bitter he has seen in his 29 years with the CTA’s Lancaster office.

“Before collective bargaining came in during the late 1970s, we used to try to see who could be more macho,” Box said. “It’s very rare nowadays when we have this kind of confrontational bargaining.”

Crawford, speaking just hours before his suspension, got in some shots of his own.

“This crisis was manufactured. There is no crisis,” he said. “They play rough and then they call foul. . . . They’re devoting energy that should be focused on teaching boys and girls.”

A strike would be just the latest dramatic chapter in the history of the district of 2,200 students spread across two elementary schools, a middle school and a high school.

In November 1992, residents voted by a 3-1 margin to add a high school and become a unified district. No more bus rides at dawn to the Antelope Valley, no more rooting for some other town’s football team.

The following autumn, the district added ninth-grade classes and another grade each year, until the first high school class to attend all four years in Acton graduated last spring.

“Everyone advised them to wait and plan before they went ahead and put in the high school,” said Diana Baker, a special education teacher and co-president of the Acton-Agua Dulce Teachers Assn., which represents about 90% of the teaching staff. “But with the prevailing call of ‘Bring our children home,’ they started to get the school together. And we never could get the community behind us once things didn’t come together.”

The teachers have worked without a new contract since Vasquez High opened in the fall of 1993. After failing to follow through on promises of raises in the early 1990s, the district abided by independent arbitrator Philip Tamoush’s ruling in 1996 that it owed the teachers $318,000 in back pay. Checks were issued within a few months.

Crawford, though, took issue with other points of the arbitrator’s award and hired his own auditor to review the numbers. He then decided to ask a Los Angeles Superior Court judge to vacate Tamoush’s ruling. A court date for the appeal has been set for March 18.

The union maintains the district has refused to pay nearly $300,000 worth of additional back pay included in the arbitrator’s ruling, covering the last couple of years of stagnant wages.

County figures suggest that the district is not exactly letting teachers starve. Of the county’s 47 districts with high schools, Acton-Agua Dulce’s veteran teachers earn the third-highest base salary. Those with 12 years of service to the district, for example, get at least $55,566 and five-year veterans earn a base of $38,705. Entry-level teachers earn $30,624, ranking 15th out of the 47.

Baker dismisses those figures.

“We’re much closer to schools in Santa Clarita and the Antelope Valley,” which also rank high in the pay standings, she said. “That’s who we compete with for teachers.”

Another key sticking point involves the average work day. Teachers believe they had an agreement with the district that the new contract would stipulate only that they arrive at school five minutes before the opening bell and stay five minutes after the school day ends.

Crawford, however, recently issued a memo ordering teachers to abide by the old contract still in effect, which requires teachers to get in 30 minutes before the first class and stay 15 minutes after the end of the last period.

Both sides point out that teachers usually put in much more than the required time anyway. But, as so often has happened in the district’s history, something seemingly routine has proven powerfully divisive.

Before the first No. 2 pencil ever got sharpened at Vasquez High, controversy surfaced. Some residents assailed the choice of its name, which honors the colorful 19th century figure Tiburcio Vasquez, who had a Robin Hood-like reputation, and who some historians say stole mostly from white settlers before being hanged in 1875.

In later years, school trustees have quit, citing mental exhaustion; one was recalled by the voters.

The district gained widespread attention in 1994 as one of half a dozen districts statewide threatened with court action by state education officials for refusing to administer the California Learning Assessment System tests. Board members protested that the tests, which emphasized open-ended and essay questions over multiple-choice, was anti-family and invaded students’ privacy. No lawsuit was brought.

The county Office of Education, which has monitored the district closely since unification, gives it a clean bill of financial health. But Christopher Burdy, a county consultant, noted in a generally positive report dated Jan. 15 that the district projects an operating deficit of nearly $500,000 over the next two years, largely to help pay for a new elementary school.

The new school was planned to serve an increasing enrollment, but Burdy said the latest projections show the district dropping from its current daily attendance average of 2,184 to 1,967 by the year 2000--which could reduce the state’s per-pupil subsidy.

“The declining trend . . . could have serious implications for the district’s ongoing fiscal recovery,” Burdy wrote.

Vasquez Principal Gayle van Zijll said teachers--most of whom came to the district when she did in 1996--have not let the labor dispute affect their teaching.

As the struggle drones on, the district is forging a unique identity. It has started a military studies track for the 10% of graduates who go into the armed services and offers one of California’s rarest physical education electives: rodeo.

A 50-acre site for a new high school has been selected at Red Rover Mine and Escondido Canyon roads, but van Zijll said that the only source of money to build it would be to get the voters to pass a bond issue.

After years of negotiating for the teachers, Baker doubts a bond issue could ever pass.

“This is a bedroom community,” she said. “There’s really not a lot of neighborhood stuff. People care about the schools, but they work in L.A. or the [San Fernando] Valley and then come back to their horse ranches.”