L.A. teachers go on strike for first time in 30 years
LOS ANGELES — With umbrellas in one hand and picket signs in the other, Los Angeles teachers braved cold, drizzly weather Monday morning as they walked off the job in their first strike in 30 years to demand smaller class sizes, more support staff at schools and better pay.
“Let’s be clear, educators don’t want to strike,” United Teachers Los Angeles President Alex Caputo-Pearl said to a crowd of supporters during a morning news conference at John Marshall High School. “We don’t want to miss time with our students. We don’t want to have less money for the car payment or less money for the school supplies that we always end up buying ourselves.”
Schools will be open during the strike, but it’s unknown how many students will head to classes in the nation’s second-largest school system. Some students and parents opted to join teachers on the picket line.
For those who go to school, the day is unlikely to follow routines as volunteers, an estimated 400 substitutes and 2,000 staffers from central and regional offices fill in for 31,000 teachers, nurses, librarians and counselors. At 10 schools, nonteaching employees will take part in a sympathy strike, which will create additional headaches as administrators struggle to manage such tasks as preparing and serving meals.
The teachers union is pushing for more hiring to make class sizes smaller and give schools needed support services — such as nurses and librarians — full time.
Caputo-Pearl called on federal and state leaders to increase school funding, and on the Los Angeles Unified School District to spend its reserve as well as new funding identified in the governor’s proposed budget. As others spoke at the news conference, including American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, strikers chanted and drummed in front of the school.
“The eyes of the nation are watching and educators and nurses ... all over the country have the backs of the educators in L.A.,” Weingarten said. “We need the conditions to ensure that every child ... gets the opportunity he or she or they deserve.”
At one point during the news conference, a police officer pushed through the crowd of picketers, journalists and students, escorting two students trying to get into the school.
It was still dark when physical education teacher Lin Joy Hom rolled up about 6:15 a.m. to the gate that leads to the Marshall High School parking lot on Griffith Park Boulevard, with “UTLA strong” emblazoned in red letters on her car windows. Fellow P.E. teacher Orquida Labrador — Hom’s coworker and a 1987 Marshall alumnus — hurried to help her unload water bottles and doughnuts for the educators on the picket line at the iconic Los Feliz campus.
In addition to smaller class sizes, Hom also wants every campus to have a school nurse every day. Marshall High doesn’t have a full-time nurse.
“I can’t tell a kid, ‘Don’t get hurt on Tuesday because there’s no nurse,’” she said. “We need a nurse every single day.”
A steady drizzle that threatened to slow momentum didn’t stop teachers who gathered outside the Ramon C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts. Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” blared from a speaker as a picketer thumped on a drum. A passing car honked to the beat. Another motorist pressed on his car horn and held his fist out the window as he passed.
Kelsey Cushing, who has taught chemistry at the school for five years, said she expected the crowd lining the sidewalk near the campus to swell to several hundred as the day goes on.
“What we’re fighting for is pretty important, so people are willing to come out in the rain,” she said.
During the last teachers’ strike about half of the district students went to school. The plan at many schools for this strike is to gather students into large groups, so they can be supervised by fewer adults. It’s not clear how much learning will be going on outside of the real-time civics lessons happening on the streets.
Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies Principal Martin Price said he expected the approximately 80 percent of students coming to school to dwindle to about 50 percent during the week. Students will be in the gym, auditorium and multipurpose room and separated according to whether they are in high school, middle school and elementary school, he said. Student will rotate through two periods of academic classes and one period of physical education throughout the day, he said.
At 10:30 a.m., the union has scheduled a rally at Grand Park, across from City Hall, followed by a march to school district headquarters, just west of downtown.
A strike became inevitable when negotiations broke off late Friday afternoon between the L.A. Unified School District and United Teachers Los Angeles. District officials have sweetened their previous offer based on improved funding for all school districts in the state budget proposal unveiled last week by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The district also received a boost from Los Angeles County supervisors, who could vote Tuesday on a plan to provide L.A. Unified up to $10 million for nursing and mental-health services.