Charter school teachers join LA strike
District boss says attendance drop caused by walkout costing $25M
LOS ANGELES — Teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District walked picket lines again Tuesday as administrators urged them to return to classrooms and for their union to return to the bargaining table.
“It is by no means a normal day in LA Unified,” Superintendent Austin Beutner acknowledged as the strike by thousands of members of United Teachers Los Angeles entered its second day.
“… we need our educators back in our classrooms helping inspire our students,” he said. “The painful truth is we just don’t have enough money to do everything UTLA is asking Los Angeles Unified to do.”
The walkout Monday was marked by a plunge in attendance, which cost the district about $25 million because funding is based on how many students come to school, he said.
Beutner urged teachers to join him in pushing for more funding from the state, which provides 90 percent of the district’s money. “Join me on the bus,” he said. Some charter school teachers joined their public school counterparts on picket lines. Educators with the Accelerated Schools charter network, who are also union members, but negotiate their contracts separately — walked off the job Tuesday to demand better working conditions. The action was the first by charter teachers in California, according to UTLA.
Kathleen Whitehead vowed to keep her 14-year-old daughter home Tuesday, after the teen reported not learning much Monday at a high school staffed by a skeleton crew of substitutes.
Whitehead said she grew “more and more irritated” as the ninthgrader texted that she and her classmates at Reseda High School were “shuffled from one large auditorium to the next” so they could be looked after by fewer adults.
The teen told her mom that some kids huddled around a TV showing Michelle Obama’s recent appearance on “Carpool Karaoke,” a segment from “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” while others browsed the internet for busy-work assignments.
Teachers are pressing for higher pay and smaller class sizes that school officials say could bankrupt the nation’s second-largest system, with 640,000 students.
Teachers are trying to tap into the “Red for Ed” movement that began last year and won big raises, even in states with “right to work” laws. They started in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona, and moved to Colorado and Washington state.
But unlike those strikes, which shut down many schools, all 1,240 K-12 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District were open.