bilingual teaching assistants fighting for rights

CSUN

CLAIMING THEY’RE BEING EXPLOITED by the Los Angeles Unified School District, representatives of the district’s ten thousand teaching assistants went before the Board of Education on Monday to ask for equal treatment and benefits.

Representatives say the assistants are essential to the district’s bilingual education plan, which provides instruction for more than half its students. Yet at present they receive no benefits such as a health plan, sick leave, and vacations.

“It’s pure and simple exploitation,” said Barbara Lewis, concerning the district’s treatment of teaching assistants during the last fifteen years. Lewis works for the Service Employees International Union Local 99 and is serving as the director of the teaching assistant’s organizing campaign.

The assistants asked the board Monday to officially recognize local 99 as their bargaining representative and submitted union membership cards signed by six thousand assistants. The union currently represents other school employees, such as special education trainees and assistants, bus drivers, and custodians. It also represents educational aides, who perform essentially the same duties as teaching assistants but receive numerous benefits.

According to Lewis, the teaching assistant position was created by the board in the mid- l970s for just this reason. Confronted with an increasing number of immigrant students, the district saw the need for a greater number of aides. The assistant classification was created to allow the board to save money by hiring what were essentially more educational aides without having to provide the new employees with a benefits package. The district thus “balanced its budget on the backs of these people for years,” Lewis said.

The injustice of the district’s treatment of the assistants as “second class citizens” has become glaringly apparent, Lewis said, as the number of non- and limited-English speaking students has increased. At present, sixty percent of the students in the district are classified as limited in English, and this figure rises to nearly one hundred percent in some schools, according to literature put out by Local 99.

The major function assistants perform is that of translator and interpreter for these children. About seven thousand assistants, seventy percent, are bilingual Latinas.

“The children depend on us for learning,” said Norma Herrera, an assistant at 52nd Street School. “We are their only channel of communication with the teacher. These students often respond better to us than the teachers simply because we understand their language and culture,” she told the board.

There are only one thousand, five hundred fully certified bilingual teachers, about one for every one hundred limited-English students, and these teachers can earn a bonus of five thousand dollars a year. Bilingual education aides also qualify for extra pay, but assistants do not.

Teaching assistants are the second largest group of employees in the district after teachers, but they receive no health benefits, sick leave, vacations, or social security. They’re also denied holiday pay. In November, for example, the Thanksgiving break can cost them close to two hundred dollars, according to Jeanne Cervantes, an assistant for the past seven years.

Full-time assistants work three to six hours a day five days a week earning approximately twelve thousand, five hundred dollars a year. A full-time educational aide works for the same number of hours but makes more than thirteen thousand dollars a year, according to Local 99.

Assistants also lack job security: They’re laid off at the end of each school year and rehired in September. However, rehiring is not guaranteed.

District officials say this is because the assistant position is for “temporary,” student employees (the only difference between assistants and aides is that assistants are required to be enrolled in at least one college course while working. One assistant said it could be any course, even swimming). Most assistants, however, work for several years. The average tenure is three to seven, with some assistants who have worked for the district for as long as fifteen years.

The assistants are hoping, through the union, not only to gain security and other benefits but also to force the district to create incentives within the job to pursue college study necessary to earning a teaching credential. The assistant position is a natural training ground for bilingual teachers, they say, but they claim no such incentives are offered.

Mark Slovkin, a board member and chairman of its personnel committee, said he sympathizes with the assistants. He admitted that the district created the classification to save money, saying that as federal and state funding for bilingual education programs became scarce, “the incentive at the school site has been to ... hire more assistants, because they're cheaper.”

It’s time for the district to change course, he said.

“There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that in a district with so few bilingual teachers, we are largely dependent on assistants to allow us to serve the kids who don’t speak English.”

The major problem, he said, is where the money will come from. According to district officials, it faces up to a hundred and eighty million dollars in spending cuts next year, owing for the most part to salary and benefit increases to employees. Slovkin said that if assistants receive benefits, the district will probably be forced to hire fewer of them.

On Monday, the board accepted the signed union cards and, according to Shel Ehrlich of the district’s public information office, “the matter will be reviewed.”

By state law, the board can voluntarily recognize the union as bargaining representative or it can ask the assistants to formally vote in order to demonstrate majority support for Local 99.

Janet Coffman, a union representative, said she hopes the presentation of the cards will force the board to act quickly.

“The board needs to make a decision,” she said. “We have the cards. We have the majority. We hope it’ll happen.”

At a lively rally outside the meeting venue, a large group of teaching assistants was singing and chanting. One stepped out of the crowd, and, taking position behind an invisible lectern, shouted, “Talk about vacation pay!"

The crowd cried back, “Yeah!”

“Talk about pensions!”

“Yeah!”

“Talk about sick leave!”

“Yeah!”

The loudest cry of affirmation, however, came when someone in the crowd yelled, “How about respect?!” +