Higher Pay for Teachers Is Affordable, Consultant Says

A management consultant hired by the Orange school board has issued a report supporting teachers’ contentions that the district has extra money in its budget.

The report, by Olav Sorenson, an assistant professor at UCLA’s graduate school of management, says the district has consistently overestimated its expenses and underestimated its revenues.

And it has kept an unnecessarily high level of emergency reserves, about $15 million last fiscal year, the report says. According to Sorenson, the reserve requirement set by the state for a district the size of Orange is about $5 million to $7 million.

Sorenson, who unveiled his report at a board meeting Thursday, said that if the district tapped into the reserves, it could use roughly $7 million annually for other expenses.

Trustee Kathy Ward said Sorenson “backed into the numbers to create a facade that doesn’t exist.” She said the district did not have extra funds.

Teachers’ salaries, some of the lowest in the county, have been a contentious issue in the bitterly divided school district where teacher unrest played a role in unseating three board members during a recall campaign in June. Four of the seven board seats are up for reelection on Nov. 6.

“What do they have against the teachers?” teachers union president Paul Pruss said of the former board majority. “The last school board and their supporters who have been crying bankruptcy, they have been deceiving the public.”

Ward, who is running for reelection in November, and the other trustees voted unanimously last Thursday to approve a tentative agreement with the union to raise teacher salaries by 5.5% across the board.

District officials and the old board majority had said that the low salaries in the 30,000-student district were necessary to keep it solvent.

But Sorenson said they have played it safer than they needed to.

“It is true that to some degree I have the benefit of hindsight,” he said. “But the overestimation of expenses and the underestimation of revenues have been consistent.

“In some districts, they are up some years and down other years, but on average, they are right on the money,” Sorenson said. “But when it is always the same way, then it suggests it needs fixing.”

Supt. Barbara Van Otterloo and the district’s director of financial services, Linda Gibbs, who prepares the district’s budget, did not return calls requesting comment.