Thousands of Orange County teachers threaten to strike Thursday
April 21, 2010 | 10:00 am
Thousands of Orange County teachers say they will strike Thursday to protest stalled salary negotiations with the Capistrano Unified School District.
The district on Wednesday said it is scurrying to assemble substitute teachers to fill in for the more than 2,200 teachers who plan to strike.
The 52,000-student district is the second largest in Orange County. The pay dispute has been simmering since June, when the district proposed a more than 10% pay cut on teachers to help offset budget problems.
The teachers' union has said it will accept the pay cuts only if the district agrees to make them temporary, according to Vicki Soderberg, president the Capistrano Unified Education Assn.
Soderberg said teachers also want the district to promise it will funnel to teachers' salaries any unforeseen state or federal funding that may come in. The union, a local chapter of the California Teachers Association, voted to call the strike last week, Soderberg said.
Environmental firm accused of 'egregious' overcharging of L.A. Unified School District
April 21, 2010 | 2:49 pm
Officials have abruptly halted work with the firm that managed environmental work in the $19.5-billion school construction program of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The move arises from a critical district audit alleging that Palm Desert-based Questa Environmental Consulting repeatedly overcharged and that L.A. Unified managers looked the other way, resulting in more than $2.5 million in questionable billing.
The negative report comes in the wake of an unrelated indictment of a regional construction director on conflict-of-interest charges, tarring the nation’s largest school construction and modernization effort. Officials continue to characterize the overall construction program as clean and successful. To date, 87 of 131 new schools have been completed as well as thousands of modernization projects.
The audit from the office of the inspector general, quietly posted online earlier this month, accused Questa of billing for time unrelated to its district contract, charging higher hourly rates than justified and exceeding maximum annual billings, among other things.
The conduct was “so egregious,” said district Inspector General Jerry Thornton, that his office took the unusual step of recommending Questa’s termination as well as the discipline of two supervising district employees.
Thornton described the findings at Wednesday’s meeting of the district’s Bond Oversight Committee.
Questa had no immediate reaction to the public airing of allegations, but already had submitted a lengthy written defense to the auditors' original draft report. The company denied any wrongdoing.