Hundreds of Orange County teachers strike over pay and benefits cuts

[Omaha Steve]

Source: LA Times

Hundreds of Orange County teachers were walking picket lines Thursday, the first day of a strike protesting pay and benefits cuts in the Capistrano Unified School District.

Schools in the 51,000-student district remained open, but most after-school activities and sports events were canceled.

Scores of substitute teachers were hurriedly brought in to preside over classrooms with lesson plans that included enrichment activities in line with state education standards. But there were reports that some students were leaving campuses because there were too few substitutes.

The Capistrano Unified Teachers Assn., which represents the district’s 2,200 teachers, called the strike after negotiations over wage and benefits cuts broke down. The district last month imposed a 10% pay cut on teachers.

Both sides have agreed to meet in a closed-door session later Thursday to try to end the deadlock.

-- Carla Rivera

Photo at link: Teacher Kay Serafini is comforted by sixth-grader Nikki Sadriafter after the teacher was seen crying on the picket line at Carl Hankey K-8 School in Mission Viejo. Credit: Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times


Read more: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/04/hundreds-of-orange-county-teachers-strike-over-pay-and-benefits-cuts.html

[hayu_lol]

1. Capistrano is a very wealthy school district...

the entire area is loaded with super-expensive homes with all the trimmings. The teachers union and the district signed a contract covering salaries and benefits. Cut someplace else.

Neither the teachers nor the union are responsible for the problems.

[stopbush]

2. I kept our two kids home today. Why toss them into such a situation by crossing picket lines?

The couldn't get enough subs, so there were 80 kids in a classroom at my son's HS. Kids brought their X-Boxes and hooked them up to the TVs in the classrooms. Kids came and went as they saw fit. I don't call that a school day.

Our school board has been taken over by anti-public school Rs. They are demanding teachers take a permanent 10.1% pay cut while threatening to fire hundreds of teachers next year.

The local superintendents have offered a plan that will not raise taxes and will not cause a single teacher to be fired. It involves doing away with some of the 46 state regulations imposed by Sacramento on local school districts. At present, OC schools are forced to borrow money from banks to meet State mandates because the state legislature can't get its act together and pass funding bills in time to fund their mandates. That costs OC schools almost $800,000 a year in INTEREST payments on the money they're forced to borrow to meet the unfunded state mandate. OC schools spend $300-million a year printing up one-size-fits-all registration packets for HS kids. That means that kids like mine - who started HS in 9th grade and will be in the same HS as a senior - gets the same packet of forms every year, even though he's instructed to file a new version of the form only if something has changed from the year before! That means that 95% of those forms end up in our recycling bin, as I'm sure they do for 95% of the students who attend his HS. yet, the district's hands are tied - state regulations say they have to do this every year. Why? They're being mandated to literally produce garbage, and at a great expense.

[Trillo]

3. Brought in the strikebreakers, eh?

"substitute teachers"

That surely sends a strong message to the students NOT to JOIN their teachers' strike.

A "public" school? Hardly. A real public school would have those kids on the strike line, as there were no classes to attend, as the teachers were on strike.

Just think of the lesson that would teach. No class today, just real life.

[1monster]

4. Ask the teachers how they feel about the substitue teachers. Most teachers

love substitute teachers because without them, they would be forced to cover for absent teachers with double or more students to their classes AND having to cover for the absent teachers during their planning periods.

As for the subs, they can be fired from schools for no more reason than one teacher (who never actually met the sub involved) didn't like her... Something about the teacher's husband and the sub having been acquaintences many years before they were married.

If the subs refused sub jobs during a teacher strike, they could be fired with no apeal possible. And in this economy, that would be no joke.

(I live in Florida, where teachers are forbidden from striking by law, so I'm not likely to ever face that dilemma...)

[Trillo]

6. a long time ago, I no longer have the link...

I believe it was in France. When a group went on strike (as I recall, it didn't need to be limited to teachers), the students often went on sympathy strike as part of their Social Training.

Anyway, the OC kids are being trained by the existence of classes with substitutes that the teachers striking are not really their problem, not their concern.

So, I guess I kind of see your example as off the point. I wasn't railing against substitute teachers, I was pointing out that "substitute teachers" acting as "strike breakers" specifically by presenting a somewhat viable classroom to the students for "school as usual"....Thus, reducing any desire on the part of students to participate in an unfamiliar activity such as joining a strike.

In this way, it is probably much easier for the futilism folks (oh, biz groups generally) to convince the kids that the Free Market really is best, and strikers are deserving of nothing as they are little more than disgruntled employees.

[1monster]

7. Are you a teacher? Substitutes are hired precisely to keep the classroom going

in the absence of teachers.

They are not strike breakers.

As for the students staging a sympathy stike... This is the United States you know. If the students did that, they would, at best, be suspended if the school was not closed for the duration of the strike. Some school districts are so repressive that expulsion would be on the books for them.

The powers that be are trying to break the backs of the teachers' unions AND of the public schools. Those PTB don't give a tinker's damn about the kids or their education.

And if you have classes that are doubled up and more (one poster said there were as many as eighty kids for each sub), forget "school as usual." The subs are acting purely as babysitters to make sure the kids don't tear out the walls and fixtures or kill each other. (It's hard enough in some schools to keep them from doing that even in classes of 25-30 students.)

Anyway, most states have laws on the books forbidding teacher strikes for any reason. And some states have some serious penalties attached to those laws.

[Rapier09]

5. OC is in for tough times

Along with California,hopefully the children enjoyed their day off.