In Lawe v. El Monte School Dist. (1968) 267 Cal.App.2d 20, the plaintiff, a permanent teacher, had been employed by the district for five years when he was granted a one-year leave of absence that he might teach overseas. During the period that plaintiff was on this leave of absence, the district adopted a policy of awarding salary credit for outside experience for the purpose of advancing a teacher only as high as the fourth step on the salary scale, a step plaintiff had already reached before his leave of absence. As a consequence of this combination of events, two other teachers, who had not reached the fourth step before taking leave of absence for outside teaching, were awarded credit for time thus spent, but plaintiff was not. The litigation that followed sought to equalize the allegedly discriminatory treatment of the plaintiff by allowing him salary scale credit for his teaching while on leave of absence. The effort was unsuccessful, and the appellate opinion recited: "It is within the province of the governing board of a school district to determine the extent to which credit is to be given for teaching experience outside the district (see Fry v. Board of Education, . . .) and a court is not free to interfere with such determination if the policy is reasonable in nature and is applied fairly and without discrimination. In the present case there was no abuse of discretion on the part of the governing board of the school district in not permitting the use of approved outside experience as a basis for advancement to a step higher than the fourth step. Such a limitation tended to stabilize the continuity of service within the district of experienced teachers and tended to confine the resort to outside teaching experience to those less experienced teachers who had more to gain thereby. Moreover, the prospect of credit for such outside experience could serve as a means of attracting teachers new in the profession to the El Monte School District. The record shows that such policy was applied fairly and without discrimination." ( Lawe v. El Monte School Dist., supra, 267 Cal.App.2d 20, 22-23.)