Orange School Talks Collapse; Teachers Go Back on Strike

Orange Unified School District teachers will resume their strike today after the collapse late Tuesday night of once-optimistic contract negotiations.

State labor mediator Draza Mrvichin announced at 11:15 p.m. that negotiations between school district representatives and the Orange Unified Education Assn. had ceased and no new talks were scheduled.

About three hours earlier, about 650 of the district’s 1,100 teachers met in a rally in Anaheim, where they overwhelmingly voted at 8 p.m. to return to the picket lines this morning if no better settlement was forthcoming in contract talks that were expected to last through the night, union president Mark Rona said.

Russell Barrios, president of the Orange Unified school board, expressed dismay late Tuesday night that contract talks had again broken down and that teachers had voted to resume the strike.

“I’m very disappointed and I think this is an act of recklessness on the part of the union,” Barrios said.

Barrios said that the school district is financially pressed to its limits and that the district offer now on the negotiating table means that some teachers may have to be laid off.

“We’re already to the point where we may have to lose up to 30 teachers next year,” he said, adding that he had warned union officials about the possible layoffs. Their collective response, he said, was, “ ‘That’s your responsibility, not ours.’ ”

The collapse of talks came despite the personal intervention of state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig. On Monday, Honig persuaded the teachers to suspend their three-day strike and return to classes for a temporary “cooling-off” period and allow negotiators for the district and the union to resume talks with the state mediator.

Both sides had expressed optimism Monday that agreement could be reached in the 15-month-long contract dispute. But those hopes disappeared by 7:15 Tuesday night, when teachers’ union negotiators left bargaining talks for the previously scheduled union meeting.

The vote, held in a closed room of the Grand Hotel in Anaheim, came after Rona told those assembled that school district administrators were refusing to budge on the teachers’ demand for more money.

Union Officials Leave

The session with the mediator began at the Doubletree Hotel at The City in Orange at 1 p.m. Tuesday. But about six hours later, union officials left the hotel, saying that they needed to confer with rank-and-file teachers at the planned meeting.

Rona and other union officials drove to the Grand Hotel, about five miles away, and met with the teachers behind closed doors at 7:30 p.m.

An hour later, the doors opened and Rona marched into a flood of waiting television camera lights and said: “The teachers just voted to go on strike . . . and they’re not going to return until negotiations have been completed.”

The central issue is a pay raise for the teachers, whose last contract expired June 30, 1987. A deadlock in the talks led to a one-day strike on April 12, two massive “sickouts” by the teachers, and then the walkout that began Thursday.

Orange Unified, with 24,500 students, includes the cities of Orange and Villa Park and parts of Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Anaheim. It is the third largest district in Orange County, after the Santa Ana and Garden Grove unified school districts, respectively.

Ted Bynum, executive director of the teachers union, said Tuesday night that the union had dropped its demand for a retroactive annual pay raise from 3.45% to 3%. But he said the district refused to increase its previous offer of a one-time-only bonus of 2.54%.

Rona, at the mass meeting of the teachers, said: “We’re only a half-percent apart for a settlement this year, but the district won’t come up with any more money.”

Jack Elsner, personnel administrator for the school district, said the union’s statement about the money difference is misleading.

“If we’re just talking about the pay raise, it’s true that there is about a half-percent difference,” he said. “But there are other differences including the fringe benefits, such as health and welfare, that add up to almost a million dollars’ difference.”

Elsner said the school district has stretched its budget as far as it can go. He noted that the state allocated only a 2.54% increase in new school funds for the current year. He added that the district’s offer actually totals 4.64% when fringe benefits and automatic pay raises for seniority are included.

Elsner and other district officials expressed surprise and concern that the teachers had voted to resume the strike.

“Here we are in the middle of the negotiating process and something like this happens,” Elsner said. “They haven’t heard everything we have to say yet. They voted to go on strike and we’re still willing to talk.”

Earlier, outside the meeting room in Anaheim, one parent got into a shouting match with teachers after the announcement by union officials that the strike would resume.

“The kids don’t want to go to school now because they are not learning anything,” parent Beverly Collins declared.

One teacher replied that she was tired of working under substandard conditions. Another said teachers had gone back to school Tuesday in good faith and were frustrated at being no closer to a settlement.

Mark Tipple, a Linda Vista Elementary schoolteacher, said: “We are out until we get a contract. All we are asking for is a compromise.”

But Collins, who said her 17-year-old son attends Orange High School, added that she did not support the teachers or the district.

“I’m upset with both,” she said. “I don’t think either one of them cares about the students. The students have lost their priority.”

Collins asked union leader Rona, “Do we have to boycott? Do we have to keep our kids out of school? What’s it going to take (to resolve the labor dispute)?”

Rona replied, “I have absolutely no idea.”