LA teachers striking, but schools still open
LOS ANGELES — Tens of thousands of Los Angeles teachers went on strike Monday for the first time in three decades after contract negotiations failed in the nation’s second-largest school district, but schools stayed open with the help of substitutes and district officials said students were learning.
Educators and parents wearing ponchos and rain boots and carrying umbrellas gathered downtown to march from City Hall to district headquarters in the pouring rain, pressing for higher pay and smaller class sizes that the district says could bankrupt the school system with 640,000 students.
“Students, we are striking for you,” teachers union President Alex Caputo-Pearl told a cheering crowd.
Teachers aim to build on the momentum of successful walkouts nationwide, which launched last year in conservative states and now have moved to the more unionfriendly West Coast. But unlike those strikes that shut down many schools and forced parents to find other care for their kids, all 1,240 K-12 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District were open.
Bus service was normal, breakfast and lunches were being served, and “students are safe and learning,” Superintendent Austin Beutner said at a press conference.
The district has hired hundreds of substitutes to replace educators and staff members who left for picket lines, a move that the teachers union has called irresponsible.