L.A. teachers on strike, leaving their 600,000 students in limbo
Under a relentless cold drizzle, 32,000 Los Angeles educators walked off the job Monday in the country’s second-biggest school district.
That means about 600,000 kids have no idea when they’ll see their teachers again.
Weeks of heated negotiations between the United Teachers Los Angeles union and the Los Angeles Unified School District went nowhere, leading to the city’s first teachers’ strike in 30 years.
But this strike isn’t focused on teachers’ salaries.
“It’s absolutely not the pay raise. It’s about class size reduction. In other words, hire more teachers,” said Andrea Cohen, who’s taught at John Marshall High School for 24 years.
“We want to have fully staffed schools. That means librarians, nurses, psychiatric social workers and their interns. We have 46, 45, 50 students in a class. It’s unacceptable.”
Both the union and the school district say they want smaller class sizes, bigger teacher salaries and more counselors and nurses in the district’s roughly 1,000 schools.
The big debate revolves around how to fund them.
Meanwhile, students are still expected to go to school during the strike.
Despite the mass exodus of teachers and staff, classes will continue at all schools. LAUSD has hired about 400 substitute teachers and reassigned more than 2,000 administrators to help educate the 600,000 students.
As for how that works out logistically, “It’s case by case, school by school,” said Shannon Haber, chief communications officer for LAUSD.
The huge shortage of teachers is enough to make Andrew Krowne keep his four children at home.
“It’s just a sheer overwhelming number of children versus adults,” he said. “I’m not risking my children’s safety.”
While both UTLA and LAUSD have made some concessions, both the union and the school district accuse the other of giving misleading facts and figures.
In LAUSD’s latest offer to the union Friday, the school district said it “would add nearly 1,200 more educators — teachers, counselors, nurses and librarians — in schools, reducing class size in thousands of classrooms.”
Class sizes in grades four to six would be limited to 35 students, and class sizes in all middle and high school math and English classes would be limited to 39 students, the school district said.
The offer would also “ensure no increase in any class size, increase nurses, counselors and librarians at all schools, along with a 6 percent salary increase and back pay for the 2017-2018 school year,” LAUSD said.
But union president Alex Caputo-Pearl said the offer was good for only one year and that the school district’s proposal was “woefully inadequate.”
The union wants LAUSD to pull from its $1.86 billion in reserves to increase school staffing and boost teachers’ salaries by 6.5 percent.
But the school district says it’s not nearly as wealthy as the teachers’ union suggests.
“School budgets in California are set in three-year increments, and from July 2018 to June 2021, Los Angeles Unified will spend $24 billion educating students. This includes its entire, existing $1.8 billion reserve,” LAUSD said.
The school district said at this rate, it might not even have enough money to meet a required 1 percent reserve by the 2021-22 school year.
“Our commitment to our families is to make sure all of the money we have is being spent in schools. We are doing that,” LAUSD superintendent Austin Beutner said in a statement.
The financial situation is so bad, the Los Angeles County Office of Education is stepping in. Last week, the state-funded regulatory agency assigned fiscal experts to work with the school district on a plan to “eliminate deficit spending and restore required financial reserve levels.”
And the Los Angeles school board has ordered the superintendent to come up with a three-year “enterprise plan” to get more revenue by March 18. That plan “could include parcel tax and school bond measures, as well as strategies for increasing enrollment.”
Mr. Beutner blamed the union for the stalemate, saying it rejected the school district’s latest offer Friday and then “walked away from bargaining.”
“We remain committed to resolve the contract negotiations as soon as possible,” the superintendent said. “We would encourage them to resume bargaining with us anytime, anywhere, 24/7. We’d like to resolve this.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom urged the two sides to go back to the negotiating table. Mr. Newsom said he has submitted a budget “that would make the largest ever investment in K through 12 education, help pay down billions in school district pension debt and provide substantial new funding for special education and early education.”