Orange Teachers Qualify for Combat Pay

Are you a schoolteacher who enjoys tension, hostility and mistrust? Are you as adept at carrying a picket sign as teaching science? Can you love students while hating the school board?

If so, the Orange Unified School District may be the place for you.

Let’s just say they have some openings.

District officials held a one-day “recruitment fair” earlier this week and the first question they should have asked prospective teachers was, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

What sane person would wade into the quagmire that marks the district’s relationship with its teachers? So far this year, unhappy teachers have picketed several schools in the district and staged a one-day sickout in which 400 of them stayed home.

As if to underscore the mood, as applicants showed up this week at the recruitment session, current Orange teachers picketed and handed them fliers telling them why they shouldn’t join their ranks.

If the wannabe teachers needed even more clues as to what their futures might hold, they could have gone to the trustees’ meeting Thursday night, which teachers picketed too.

And let’s not even get into the pending civil rights suit filed against the district by students who formed a Gay-Straight Alliance. Nor the ruckus at a recent board meeting that stemmed from that controversy--in which a principal was bitten by a teenage girl.

If there’s a more acrimonious atmosphere in the state between teachers and school board, good luck finding it.

The district says it needs 300 new teachers next year, fully one-fifth of its entire roster. The teachers association says the figure likely will be closer to 400.

Take a Deep Breath

It would take a miniseries to recap the differences between the two sides. A teachers union that once was able to have its way with the school board has in recent years run into the proverbial stone wall. The board majority has made no secret of its desire to rein in the teachers association and anything else that veers from a classically conservative agenda.

Thus, the battle is joined.

Forget subterfuge. Things are so openly discordant that the teachers union doesn’t even dispute that it wants to dissuade prospective teachers from coming.

And last week, the board unilaterally imposed a new contract on the teachers, giving them an 8% pay raise and making what it called a major concession in the benefits package. The teachers responded by saying they’d file an unfair-labor-practice charge against the district.

Teachers association official Val Steine says the group can’t in good conscience encourage young teachers to take jobs in the district. She says career teachers in Orange can’t come close to matching the lifetime earnings or benefits packages of those from the top districts in the county.

I suggest to Steine that the district will say how dare the teachers sabotage its hiring efforts.

“We’re going to say how dare we not advise a beginning teacher of what the results of working in Orange are,” Steine replies.

Sabotage is precisely the word that district spokeswoman Judith Frutig chooses. She also wonders what the reaction might be from an Orange parent “whose child had a [potential]) teacher driven away from school.”

Frutig says that about 150 people showed up for the job fair. They saw videos and talked with administrators and filled out applications. She says the district is concerned about the counter-effort but says, “They’re trying to sabotage the process. To this point, they’re failing.”

The way things work in Orange, the teachers association will see that merely as a challenge.

I ask Steine and Frutig if there’s an end in sight to the bad blood.

Steine says the community needs to rise up and elect more accommodating trustees. Frutig says the board reflects the community’s wishes and that the contract is fair. “I’m not sure what they’re unhappy about,” she says of the teachers. Two sides speaking two different languages.

Do they really think they’ll find 300 teachers who’ll want to be caught in the middle of that?

*

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by e-mail to [email protected]