Little Room to Negotiate

By Ellie McGrath

In hard times, teacher unions and school boards settle for less

The lessons were stern and clear for the San Jose Unified School District, one of the largest in Northern California. With 32,000 students, San Jose entered the fall term with a $5 million budget deficit and without the services of 154 teachers, who had been laid off during the summer. Ten elementary schools had been shut down to save money, creating shorter classes and crowded classrooms. With the depletion of the state surplus that since 1978 had buffered the effects of Proposition 13, San Jose had to renege on a promise made in January to offer a 6% pay increase to teachers. The teachers, in turn, filed a formal grievance with the school board. But they are still in the classrooms. "At least they didn't strike," says Norbert Strecker, president of the school board. "If this had happened a year ago, they would have." Adds Deputy Superintendent Aaron Seandel: "They know we're broke. The kind of money we need you don't get from bake sales."

Throughout the country, teacher unions are fighting just to keep what they still have in the face of declining enrollments, diminishing tax bases and federal education cutbacks. For their part, school districts everywhere are trying to wring concessions out of teacher unions in the form of pay freezes, benefit reductions and even salary cuts. But with both sides hurting economically, there is little ground for negotiation. In Cleveland, 4,000 teachers who struck for eleven weeks at the start of the 1979-80 school year are now at work without a new contract and have made no strike threats. The Chicago Teachers Union ratified a contract last month that includes salary freezes and the loss of one day's pay. Says the union spokesman, Chuck Burdeen: "Our membership is well-educated; they understand the climate of the times."

Always a last resort, strikes have become an increasingly unattractive option for teachers. There were a record 242 strikes in the 1979-80 school year. The following year there were 191; so far this fall there have been about 65. Only some 20 strikes are still in progress today, and few seem likely to continue for long. A 19-day strike ended in Teaneck, N.J., last week after State Superior Court Judge Sherwin Lester leaned on both sides. He ordered teachers back to work and, when they refused, began commandeering school buildings for use as makeshift jails to confine groups of teachers during the day. When an intransigent board of education failed to produce a quorum for a crucial bargaining session, the judge pressured board members to negotiate with the union. The final three-year settlement for the teachers represents yearly pay increases of from 7.5% to 9.7%.

By today's standards, the modest Teaneck settlement is a windfall. In Detroit teachers protested a school-board demand for an 8% reduction in their salaries, but started classes as bargaining continued. They went on strike when the board agreed to drop the salary rollback, but only in exchange for other financial concessions. When their medical benefits came close to expiration last week, the 9,000 teachers reluctantly voted to end the 22-day walkout and consented to a tentative accord, which is expected to be ratified by early this week. It maintains teachers' salaries at last year's levels, but sends 15 unresolved issues to binding arbitration. One of the remaining issues is medical benefits. Says High School Teacher Bob Grant: "My big objection is that even health benefits are on the table. When you've got a family, those things are important." Sighs Teacher Mary Johnson: "I'm glad to be back at work at last year's schedule, but I do consider that a major concession, not a victory."

In reality, school boards and teacher unions across the country face new priorities that are disagreeable to both. St. Louis, saddled with a desegregation program that costs $17 million a year and a loss of $12 million in federal funds it had counted on, has eliminated elementary art and music courses and reduced school security. Boston, as a result of a tax-cutting initiative called Proposition 2 1/2, has laid off 1,100 white tenured teachers in order to obey a 1981 court order requiring that 20% of the teaching population be black, no matter what the staff level. Says Kathleen Kelley, president of the Boston Teachers Union: "What we have is people with up to 16 years of seniority, who happen to be white, losing their jobs." The B.T.U. appealed the court order, but last week the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, in effect leaving the layoff scheme in place.

Many cost-conscious compromises cut deeply into educational quality. In San Jose, the school board decided to reassign grades six through eight to a junior high school unit. One result is that Ed Hodges, who taught math and science to 92 seventh-and eighth-graders last year, now teaches 290 students. Says he: "We see more children and we have more classes per day. Teachers are washed out by the end of the week." In California, severe budget cutting has also lopped off class time; in the course of their public school career students will spend an average of a year and a half less in class than the typical U.S. student.

Some communities are committing themselves to basic coping. Cambridge, Mass., avoided a court battle like Boston's by putting together a coalition of school-committee members, teachers and "interveners" (parents and members of minority groups).

The coalition devised a complicated channeling system to accommodate both race and seniority in layoff decisions. In Michigan, where the unemployment rate ranks highest, voters have taken strong steps to arrest further school-budget cutting. A statewide "critical list" identifies 33 districts that lack enough money to finish out the school year. Citizens in 30 of them have already approved various tax proposals aimed at bolstering budgets and keeping schoolsopen. --By Ellie McGrath.

Reported by Linda Di Pietro/Detroit and Karen Morton/San Jose

With reporting by Linda Di Pietro, Karen Horton

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