Irate Teachers Attack Community College District on Pay

A parade of angry teachers denounced the Ventura College Community College District Tuesday night for failing to accept the recommendations of an independent fact-finder brought in to break a deadlock in negotiations for faculty salaries.

“You overspend in management, in management systems . . . in management travel,” Octavio Sifuentes, president of the American Federation of Teachers, Local 1828, told the college board. “Do the students come first? The answer you give us is that management comes first.”

About 360 full-time faculty members and 800 part-time teachers at Ventura, Moorpark and Oxnard colleges have been working without a contract since last July. They say the district should abide by the recommendations of an impartial fact-finder who concluded last month that teachers should receive a 6% annual salary increase retroactive to last July.

The fact-finder, whose appointment was mandated by state labor rules after a state mediation team failed to resolve the salary dispute, also recommended that the district issue raises based on years of service and add another salary step for part-time faculty.

“You can’t go through the whole process and then say, ‘Nah, we don’t want to play,’ ” said Barbara Hoffman, chief negotiator for the AFT local. “It makes a mockery of the whole process.”

Further negotiation sessions were slated for Wednesday afternoon and Thursday, but officials for both sides said that settlement could not come until Thursday evening at the earliest and that the dispute might drag on past then. Hoffman said teachers were incensed, and he did not discount the possibility of a strike later this week if the AFT’s demands are not met.

Historically, the fact-finding report has been the final step in district/faculty negotiations.

But district officials pointed out that the recommendations of the fact-finder, Edward Scholtz, are not binding. They contend there simply is not enough money in the $50-million annual budget to grant that request, which would cost about $1.5 million.

At the last round of bargaining, negotiators for the district offered a 3.4% increase retroactive to last December and scuttled all other benefit requests--a package worth about $750,000, school officials said.

Alfred P. Fernandez, chancellor of the Ventura County Community College District, called the 6.1% pay hike unrealistic.

“If we were to give it, it would have to be predicated on borrowing from next year’s allocation.”

The escalating debate over teacher salaries has been fanned by a union report that claimed the college district is top-heavy with administrators. The study found that the district has the 11th-highest revenue of 70 districts statewide but that salaries for full-time faculty members rank 44th in the state.

It also noted that some administrators were paid up to 23% higher than the state average and that other multi-college districts managed adequately without three vice presidents for each college, the standard at Ventura’s Community College District.

“The Oxnard College library can only afford to subscribe to 100 magazines yet Oxnard College can afford three vice presidents,” Sifuentes charged angrily at Tuesday’s board meeting. Sifuentes is a librarian at Ventura College.

Larry Miller, a faculty negotiator who compiled the report, said the teachers’ union has identified $2 million in funds that could be made available for increases.

But on Wednesday, Fernandez blasted the union report as “skewed” and said Miller was “picking and choosing figures, not presenting the information in total.”

In rebuttal, Fernandez said the district has compiled its own report that shows that its administration is not bloated. In fact, management positions have recently dropped from 66 to 53 and six more positions will go unfilled this year because of budget problems, Fernandez said.

But such assertions failed to appease about 100 hostile faculty members who crowded into the board’s meeting room Tuesday, carrying placards and chanting “Settle now” after each teacher’s appeal before the board.

“I find this not only discouraging but degrading,” said Don Villaneuve, a biology teacher at Ventura College who is also a member of the Ventura City Council.

“The district has the worst negotiating record of any school district in this county.”