Sickout Staged to Support Teachers

At least 100 students were absent from elementary schools in the Orange Unified District Friday in a symbolic, one-day strike in support of their teachers, who are the most poorly paid in the county.

“This is critical,” said Jeffrey Skalman, who kept his three children home from Fletcher Elementary, the primary target of the strike. “These are the best teachers I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. People have said, ‘Don’t use the children as tools.’ Well, don’t use the teachers as tools.”

The parents, some of whom have never attended a PTA meeting, said they’ve heard the union warnings that one-fourth to one-third of the teachers might quit the district for higher-paying jobs this spring.

“How many teachers will be left?” wondered Debbie Gutierrez, who also kept her children home from Fletcher, a school with about 690 students. “They’ll all end up leaving and then what will happen to the kids? It’s just so unfair.”

Teachers have been working without a contract for nearly a year while negotiations continue.

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Bill Lewis, a trustee on the Board of Education, whose own children attend Fletcher, said the parents are allowing themselves to be duped by the union.

“I wish some of these people would listen to both sides,” he said. “My kids go to the same school they do. Do they think I want these teachers to leave? I’m beginning to believe that the union is so emotionally involved they want to bring the district to its knees in order to see the board change in the November elections. It has nothing to do with what’s best for the kids.”

District negotiators are under intense pressure to recruit new teachers, a hot commodity at a time when schools need more instructors for a popular state program that reduces some elementary classes to 20 students. The district has offered a contract that gives large raises to new teachers and to those hired after 1992, the year the district stopped offering lifetime health benefits upon retirement.

More experienced teachers would have to agree to a buyout of those lifetime benefits before being eligible for a significant raise under district proposals.

Union negotiators insist on an across-the-board raise, with the benefit buyout remaining separate.

District officials said that the burden of these retirement health benefits, referred to as an “unfunded liability,” could be as high as $195 million. Such a sum would eventually bankrupt the district, they said.

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Union President David Reger countered that his team has offered a plan that will cut the unfunded liability and give all teachers a raise without making them give up benefits. “They’ve been trying all along to drive a wedge between the different teachers,” he said.

But offering a multitiered contract that offers more pay for those without the higher benefits would equalize the system and give older teachers higher pension payments, said trustee Martin Jacobson.

The union is simply trying to get big raises and keep their expensive retirement benefits, he added.

“The fact that the union has drawn parents and students into this debate reveals what’s really important to them,” Jacobson said. “They don’t care about parents. They don’t care about students. All they care about is using them to obtain their own self-serving objectives.”

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But even parents who objected to the one-day strike said they believe the district has an obligation to make good on their promise for the benefits.

At a board meeting Thursday, a group handed trustees a petition signed by 170 parents that demanded raises for teachers.

“They deserve to receive their contract settlement without delays and we, as concerned parents, are in full support of their reasonable demands of having lifetime benefits and equal pay as other school districts,” said the letter, a copy of which was sent to Gov. Pete Wilson’s office.

The negotiators are set to meet with a mediator June 2.