Nella avanzata scuola americana gli scioperi degli insegnanti mettono in moto la macchina della giustizia.
IDDLETOWN, N.J., Nov. 30 — Striking schoolteachers and secretaries here ignored a court order to return to work today and continued their walkout for a second day. School authorities immediately asked a state judge to fine, jail and dismiss them from their jobs if the strike persisted.
The school board's motion threatening the loss of jobs is a relatively rare legal tactic in teachers' strikes in New Jersey. Middletown's Board of Education was the last one to seek such a court order during a weeklong strike at the start of the 1998-1999 school year, said Frank Belluscio, a spokesman for the New Jersey School Boards Association.
The walkout three years ago ended with a settlement about an hour before Judge Clarkson S. Fisher Jr. of State Superior Court in Freehold was to hold a hearing on the possible dismissal of striking teachers and secretaries.
Judge Fisher is also handling the school board's motions for sanctions and penalties. This afternoon in Freehold he ruled that he was again prepared to take up the issue. He set a hearing for Monday afternoon in Freehold and ordered all 1,000 striking teachers and secretaries, and their union leaders, to appear before him at that time if the strike is not settled.
Negotiations for a new contract are to resume Sunday night. The union and the school board are deadlocked, primarily over how much money teachers have to pay for their health benefits.
A spokeswoman for the striking union, Karen Joseph, called the board's motion for penalties today vindictive.
"They prefer to use the courts rather than the collective bargaining process," she said. "The board's behavior doesn't send a very positive message for Sunday night."
Judge Fisher declined today to set a deadline for the teachers and secretaries to return to work, to avoid dismissal. In a written order, he suggested that he would issue a deadline, possibly during Monday's hearing, if the strike continued.
In recent years in New Jersey, few striking teachers have faced a court threat to their jobs. At the time of the Middletown strike three years ago, state officials said they believed only four other judges had threatened dismissals in the dozens of strikes in the state since the 1960's. The first job- dismissal threat was issued by Judge Reginald Stanton in 1979 during a teachers' strike at a vocational school in rural Sussex County. The other cases occurred in Elizabeth in Union County in the late 1980's, in Little Ferry in Bergen County in the early 1990's and in South River in Middlesex County in 1995. In those strikes, the teachers returned to work or reached contract settlements before they faced court-ordered dismissal.
Mr. Belluscio said there were no state laws dealing with the issue of teachers jeopardizing their jobs by striking. But, he said, strikes by teachers and other public employees are illegal in the state, and state judges in past strikes have fined striking teachers, incarcerated them, and, in a few cases, threatened them with dismissal.