LA teachers, district reach deal

New contract raises pay, adds staff members, cuts class sizes

Striking Los Angeles teachers are joined on the picket line Tuesday by parents and students in front of Evelyn Thurman Gratts Elementary School.
Striking Los Angeles teachers are joined on the picket line Tuesday by parents and students in front of Evelyn Thurman Gratts Elementary School.

LOS ANGELES -- Teachers overwhelmingly approved a new contract Tuesday and planned to return to the classroom today after a six-day strike over funding and staffing in the nation's second-largest school district.

Although all votes hadn't been counted late Tuesday, preliminary figures showed that a "vast supermajority" of some 30,000 educators voted in favor of the deal, "therefore ending the strike and heading back to schools tomorrow," said Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, accompanied by leaders of the union and the Los Angeles Unified School District, announced the agreement at City Hall a few hours after a 21-hour bargaining session ended before dawn.

"This is a good agreement. It is a historic agreement," Garcetti said.

The deal to settle the strike in the 640,000-student district -- its first strike in 30 years -- was broadly described by officials at the news conference as including a 6 percent pay increase and a commitment to reduce class sizes over four years.

Specifics provided later by the district and the union included the addition of more than 600 nursing positions over the next three school years. Teachers complained that some schools only had a nurse on staff once a week.

Additional counselors and librarians were also part of the increase in support staff.

Teacher Marianne O'Brien said the need for additional support staff was one of the main reasons she walked picket lines.

"This is not just for teachers. It's also for counselors, nurses, psychologists and social workers," said O'Brien, who teaches 10th-grade English.

The new contract also eliminates a long-standing clause that gave the district authority over class sizes. Under the deal, grades four through 12 will be reduced by one student during each of the next two school years and two pupils in 2021-22.

District Superintendent Austin Beutner said he was delighted the deal was reached. But he hinted that financial challenges remained for the district, which is projecting a half-billion-dollar deficit this budget year and has billions obligated for pension payments and health coverage for retired teachers.

"The issue has always been 'how do we pay for it?'" Beutner said. "That issue does not go away now that we have a contract. We can't solve 40 years of underinvestment in public education in just one week or just one contract."

Under the agreement, the district, the union and the mayor's office will work jointly to "advocate for increased county and state funding" for Los Angeles schools, according to the United Teachers Los Angeles summary.

The Board of Education was expected to move quickly to ratify the deal, which would expire at the end of June 2022.

Thousands of boisterous educators, many wearing red, and their supporters gathered on the steps outside City Hall where the agreement was announced.

The crowd began roaring, blowing horns and chanting the initials of Caputo-Pearl as the smiling union leader emerged from the building and walked through the throng.

Joaquin Flores, a special education teacher, said that from what he'd been told, teachers were getting a lot of what they asked for. He believed he would support the deal unless it weakened health care or didn't go far enough to reduce class size.

"It's almost like metaphoric," Flores said. "The sun's out. When we started, it was all rainy and cold. I feel like it's a new day."

The deal came as teachers in Denver were finishing up a vote on whether to go on strike as soon as next Monday. The main sticking point is increasing base pay and lessening teachers' reliance on one-time bonuses for having students with high test scores or for working in a high-poverty school.

In Oakland, Calif., some teachers called in sick last week as part of an unofficial rally over their contract negotiations, which also hinge partly on a demand for smaller class sizes.

Information for this article was contributed by John Antczak and John Rogers of The Associated Press.

A Section on 01/23/2019

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