Unions’ Push for Raises Is Swaying School Board

Facing intense union pressure, members of the Los Angeles Board of Education appear ready to grant a pay raise demanded by school district employees, and are expected to open negotiations today.

In the past week, discussion has shifted from whether to give a raise to how much and what the district can get in exchange.

Supt. Ruben Zacarias, who had opposed the raise, began conferring with board members last week on strategies to extract greater accountability for all district employees in exchange for a salary increase.

The problem is that the district still has no comprehensive plan to link student achievement to the performance of 75,000 employees whose jobs range from processing paperwork downtown to repairing campus boilers.

A panel of experts convened by Zacarias last spring to make recommendations has not completed its work. Their reports, only now trickling in, will not be evaluated for weeks, if not months, officials said.

Lacking direction from the administration, board members are left with a grab bag of ideas that, at best, represent a symbolic step. The most widely discussed is a plan to create teams of teachers and principals to go into failing schools and prescribe remedies.

The teachers and administrators unions say that they are already committed to the intervention process and blame Zacarias for stalling its implementation.

Board member David Tokofsky complained that while he knew exactly what the unions don’t want, he couldn’t determine what the district wants.

“This is a great moment,” Tokofsky said. “We can leverage whatever we want to get. You’d think that each [administrative] division would know exactly what it wants.”

Tokofsky said he is still undecided, but leaning strongly toward reopening negotiations. Others on the seven-member board said they support new contract talks, and top administrators said they have counted at least four votes.

The timing of the wage talks was dictated by the state budget deliberations that wound down this fall with good news for the district: $50 million to $90 million more than it anticipated for the 1998-99 school year.

Zacarias hoped to spend the money on new programs such as expanded tutoring, library books and class-size reduction in the ninth grade.

Unions Exercise Dominant Influence

Union leaders claimed a share of the new money for their members, saying that the 10% increase spread over their current three-year contract does not adequately compensate for the pay cuts they took in the early 1990s. They have asked for a 4% raise in addition to the 2% they already received this year.

The board considered the unions’ request to reopen negotiations during a Sept. 29 closed session, but failed to make a decision. The unions responded with a united warning that they would use their formidable political power against any board member who voted to deny the raise.

Collectively, the unions exercise the dominant influence on school board elections, which attract little outside interest and low voter turnout. Besides representing a huge voting bloc, school employees provide generous campaign contributions to board candidates individually and through their unions.

The unions plan a mass turnout of members today when the board again considers reopening the contracts.

But the sense of impending conflict eased as board members began to signal willingness to talk and school budget officials worked over the weekend to come up with enough money to fund Zacarias’ programs and still give employees a raise.

As a stopgap, the district delayed a request to spend $21.3 million on a variety of programs, such as recruiting teachers for hard-to-staff schools to earthquake preparations.

The district was also exploring whether it could restore money to the general fund that had been committed to textbook purchases, since the district is receiving extra textbook money from the state.

Each 1% raise would cost about $27 million.

Board member Valerie Fields said she supports a raise because she believes the district still owes employees for the earlier pay cuts. “Plus we have a terrible teacher shortage. If we are going to stay competitive, we are going to have to pay them more,” Fields said.

Board President Victoria Castro said she would support offering a one-time bonus because she isn’t sure the district will have the money to pay for the raises beyond this year.

Castro and Fields said they would seek to strengthen accountability.

Fields said she wants immediate implementation of the intervention team agreement, which has been signed by the teachers and administrators unions as well as former Supt. Sid Thompson.

That agreement, which expired June 30, got stalled over Zacarias’ concerns about taking the district’s best employees out of service to serve on the teams.

“There are issues,” said Zacarias’ spokesman Brad Sales. “Is it fair to the students to have their best teachers leave for a while to help in other schools? I’m not sure there was concurrence among the two unions.”

Another idea is to tie raises to the seven indicators of student performance that Zacarias applied last year to his top staff. Managers’ raises were deferred last year until the board certified that there was improvement on six of those indicators, which included test scores, the number of students taking Advanced Placement courses and the percentage of limited-English students gaining English literacy.

Tokofsky said it would make little sense to apply that standard across the board because many employees work at schools that didn’t improve on a majority of the indicators. And some, like clerks, have little to do with things such as test scores.

Castro said she thinks all employees should be rewarded for the improvements that the district made last year.

“I’m willing to look at this onetime bonus tied to those indicators,” she said.

Teachers union President Day Higuchi said he would gladly agree to accountability based on evaluation of teachers by other experienced teachers. But he said the membership would reject any measure based on test scores.

“I haven’t seen a test yet that does the job,” Higuchi said.

A Chance to Measure Performance

Although the employees’ demands for more money were greeted with negative newspaper editorials, some prominent school district critics view the salary talks as a golden opportunity, even if the district doesn’t yet have its accountability plan nailed down.

“It’s a great time to begin to hike the standards of employee performance,” said Mike Roos, president of the business-backed reform group LEARN.

Roos, a frequent critic of school district management, said he thinks employees deserve a raise, and that accountability measures can be worked out as a part of the negotiations.

“I believe we have had enough talk about accountability,” Roos said. “There should be a more decisive and firm step forward about what constitutes adequate performance, poor performance and exceptional performance.”

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Contributions to L.A. Unified Board Members

Employee groups and individuals on the Los Angeles Unified School District payroll have accounted for 58% of campaign contributions to the seven members of the school district board since 1995--just under $440,000 in total, according to a Times computer analysis of candidate disclosure forms. United Teachers-Los Angeles topped the list with $253,405 in donations. The largest donations to the four board members facing reelection in April were:

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Candidate: Barbara Boudreaux

District: 1: Crenshaw, South-Central

Contributions: $5,000 from Service Employees International Union representing classified employees; $2,900 from L.A. Unified Police Officers Assn.

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Candidate: Jeff Horton

District: 3: West Hollywood, portions of North Hollywood

Contributions: $15,200 from Service Employees International Union representing classified workers; $10,000 from L.A. Unified Police Officers Assn.

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Candidate: David Tokofsky

District: 5: Eastern San Fernando Valley, Pacomia, San Fernando, Eagle Rock, northeast Los Angeles

Contributions: $145,669 from United Teachers-Los Angeles; $10,000 from California Teachers Assn.

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Candidate: George Kiriyama

District: 7: Gardena, Carson, Lomita, San Pedro, portions of South-Central

Contributions: $10,000 from Service Employees International Union representing classified workers; $2,500 from Associated Administrators-Los Angeles