Palos Verdes Faculty Assn. v. Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified Sch. Dist

In Palos Verdes Faculty Assn. v. Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified Sch. Dist. (1978) 21 Cal.3d 650, the California Supreme Court discussed the history of Education Code section 13506, which provided, prior to a 1969 amendment, that, "'In cities, teachers of beginners shall be ranked in the salary schedule with the highest salaried teachers in the elementary grades of equal training and experience.'" The statute further provided that, "'Uniform allowance may be made in any schedule of salaries for years of training and years of service.' " The court noted that it was held in Fry v. Board of Education (1941) 17 Cal.2d 753, that the language of this section did not prevent the board from making "reasonable classifications" as long as they were not "arbitrary, discriminatory or unreasonable" under Rible v. Hughes (1944) 24 Cal.2d 437. The district at one time had followed a policy of awarding prior experience credit to incoming teachers only for public school teaching and excluding therefrom any recognition of experience in private accredited schools. Thereafter, the policy was changed to recognize private school experience for incoming teachers, whereupon a teacher earlier employed under the old policy requested that his private school teaching experience be recognized for the purpose of placing him at a higher step on the salary schedule. When the district refused, litigation followed, and the Supreme Court eventually affirmed the trial court's issuance of a writ of mandate which compelled the district to recognize the complaining teacher's earlier private school teaching experience for salary purposes. After reviewing the cases decided under the old language of section 13506, much as has been done above, the court in Palos Verdes observed with reference to the impact of this amendment that "the intent of the Legislature in making this change, as expressed in section 3 of the operative legislation, is 'to establish a uniform base salary schedule in each school district.' Considering these elements -- i.e., the express change of language and the Legislature's own statement of intent -- in the decisional context of the enactment, we must conclude that one of the lawmaker's aims in enacting the new section was to break away from past reliance on judicial assessments of 'reasonableness' in the classification of teachers and establish a more certain standard of its own. Thus the new statute, as we read it, had the twofold purpose of (1) requiring that teachers be classified for salary purposes, and (2) establishing that such classification proceed wholly on a uniform basis of years of training and years of experience. One effect of this action was to eliminate the possibility of future results of the type exemplified by Lawe v. El Monte School Dist. (1968) by which a district, while granting a given maximum of credit for outside experience, makes such credit available on less than a uniform basis to all teachers." ( Id. at pp. 660-661.)