Veteran Teachers Fear Forced Transfers

Education: Settlement of a suit against L.A. schools may mean reassignment of high-paid faculty away from the Valley.

Veteran teacher Judy Davis toiled through the ranks of the school system for almost two decades before she was finally able to realize a long-held goal: finding a job on a campus near her Chatsworth home.

“It took me more than 17 years to get a school closer to home,” said Davis, 43, a bilingual-education teacher at Canoga Park Elementary School. “It was very difficult for me to transfer from Los Angeles.”

But now, Davis and hundreds of her colleagues around the San Fernando Valley fear their hard-won privilege of a short commute and work at a campus in the area of their choice may be in jeopardy.

Six years after a group of Latino and black parents slapped the Los Angeles Unified School District with a lawsuit alleging wide-ranging inequities in school funding, officials are on the verge of approving a settlement that could shake up school faculties throughout the city, especially in the Valley.

The plaintiffs, in a case known as “Rodriguez vs. the LAUSD,” accuse the enormous school system of funneling more cash, mostly in the form of higher salaries for senior teachers, to suburban campuses at the expense of inner-city schools, which tend to hire younger, lower-paid instructors.

With experienced teachers clustered in schools in predominantly white neighborhoods, the lawsuit contends, the district has effectively denied minority children the same educational opportunities, sometimes spending $400 less per student annually.

Under the proposed settlement, or consent decree, to be voted on by the school board next month, the district would reallocate its funds on a per-pupil basis, figured from the average amount it spends on each student.

Over the next five years, administrators at each school would be required to bring their spending in line with that average, whether through restaffing or cutting programs.

Because the Valley traditionally boasts a higher proportion of veteran teachers than elsewhere in the district, many instructors worry that the plan could result in wholesale transfers, perhaps even to the inner city, an acutely sensitive issue since the tense days of mandatory teacher transfers for desegregation purposes in the late 1970s.

“They’d have to transfer some top-paid teachers around to bring down the median pay,” said Francine Cantero, 41, a physical science teacher at Gaspar de Portola Junior High School in Tarzana. “Those are the teachers who have, say, 10 to 15 years experience. You’re taking someone committed to their career but who has a long way to go, and you’re going to make them very, very unhappy.”

A guarantee against such moves is now written into teacher contracts.

District officials have assured teachers that the majority of schools can probably balance their staffs through attrition — hiring novice teachers to replace instructors who have retired or moved away.

But one official, who asked not to be identified, conceded that if the consent decree in the Rodriguez case is adopted, mandatory transfers will most likely be the only resort for some Valley school principals as they try to achieve the funding equalization goal by 1997.

“It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if that’s where you’re supposed to be in five years, it won’t happen from natural causes,” he said.

Richard Stalder, 57, who has taught Spanish at Chatsworth High School since 1969, warned that forced transfers would push over the edge longtime teachers already disgruntled by a pay cut imposed last year.

He said students’ educations would suffer because of instructors unable to cope with frustrating commutes from the Valley to parts of downtown Los Angeles.

“Anybody who had this transfer shoved down his throat would probably use up as much sick leave as he could,” said Stalder, a Chatsworth resident. “If I had to drive to San Pedro every day, I would probably not be able to make it there as often as I would make it to my local school. I don’t mean it as a way to get even, but you just get burned out.”

To Davis and other teachers at Canoga Park, who discussed the lawsuit over lunch one day last week, seniority suddenly seems a liability rather than an asset.

“Those of us who have been teaching a very long time are obviously older, and we cost more money,” Davis said. “You may be an excellent teacher, but the school . . . can’t afford you.”

Davis, as well as other teachers and administrators, also criticized the implication in the lawsuit that veteran teachers, by virtue of their experience, are necessarily better at the job than their younger counterparts.

“It just assumes that if you’ve taught many, many years, you’re an excellent teacher, and that is not always the truth,” she said. “There are excellent teachers all the way around. Just experience alone does not make an excellent teacher.”

“That’s erroneous,” agreed Granada Hills High School Principal Anne Falotico. “Some are good at 20, and some are poor. Some are good at 50, and some are poor.”

But attorney Carol Smith of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, one of a coalition of organizations representing the plaintiffs, noted that even United Teachers of Los Angeles, the teachers union, “has been among the first” to acknowledge the fact that inexperienced instructors, especially those hired in emergency circumstances to make up staffing shortfalls, are often ill-equipped in the classroom.

“Energy and enthusiasm without knowing how to present information just don’t make it,” she said. “Everyone agrees that a teacher with more experience is a better resource.”

Instead of teacher quality, however, several principals across the Valley are worried that hiring decisions will be reduced to questions of dollars and cents.

At Castlebay Lane School in Northridge, Sarah Berry presides over a faculty whose members mostly have 10 or more years of experience; only one teacher is new.

Although she anticipates few openings over the next three years, when the time comes to interview applicants, she said, the driving concern will be money if the proposed settlement receives board approval.

“I would have to conscientiously hire new people, and that runs into a problem with achieving the best person for the job,” she said. “Instead of looking for the most outstanding teacher to hire, you’re looking for the person who will make the least amount of money.

“I can just see us calling Personnel and saying, ‘I need a teacher who makes no more than $35,000 per year, because that fits into my salary category.’ “

In Van Nuys, Patricia Abney, principal of Hazeltine Avenue School, observed that the plan could free up administrators to introduce fresh faces into faculties weighted with veteran teachers.

But too much emphasis would still be placed on monetary concerns.

“Your focus is not on children but on your budget,” Abney said.

So far, both board members who represent the Valley, Julie Korenstein and Roberta Weintraub, have publicly registered their opposition to the consent decree. “It’ll create more chaos and confusion in the schools and it’ll provide an outside agency telling us what to do,” said Weintraub, who represents the East Valley. She and Korenstein also accused the plaintiffs of using outdated statistics.

“We’re talking about information that’s almost 10 years old. This district has changed in a thousand ways in that amount of time,” Korenstein said, highlighting the fact that hundreds of inner-city children are bused onto West Valley campuses each day, so that minority pupils will actually end up being penalized rather than benefiting from the lawsuit.

“Who are we going to hurt?” Korenstein said. “Affluent children or the children this was designed to help?”

Smith of the Legal Aid Foundation rejected that argument, saying the two parties in the lawsuit fashioned the consent decree using the district’s own data from 1988.

Also, although Anglo children in the West Valley comprised just 37% of elementary school students in the last school year, their numbers were disproportionately large when compared to the district as a whole, where only 12% of elementary school children were Anglo, she said.

But Valley teachers may be more difficult to persuade that Anglo pupils are overrepresented in their classrooms.

“Everybody has the impression that the San Fernando Valley is lily-white,” said Shirley Hammer, 57, who has taught at Hamlin Street School in Canoga Park for 25 years.

“Last year, I had 34 children, and 27 of them went home to a second language. We’re a United Nations now. I don’t think Mr. Rodriguez knows that.”<



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