UTLA’s Caputo-Pearl: ‘Our goal is to win a good contract’
With school about to open for 2014-2015, Alex Caputo-Pearl embarks on his first year as president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). He couldn’t have found a busier time to begin his first term, with negotiations underway for a new collective barging contract, a curriculum transition to Common Core and a host of other issues facing his 30,000-member union.LA School Report had a chat with him today to get his thoughts on the union and the issues ahead as school doors open. Here’s what he had to say:
Question: LA Unified Superintendent John Deasy has characterized your statements of a potential strike as “breathtakingly irresponsible.” What is your response?
Answer: What is actually breathtaking is the conditions in our schools. We’ve got many schools without nurses, without librarians, arts or music programs. We’ve got some of the highest student to counselor ratios and highest class sizes in the country. What’s breathtaking is that the conditions of students and by extension educators face everyday in schools. That’s what we should be talking about when we’re using dramatic words like “breathtaking.”
Further, we are still waiting on an actual narrative and numeric description about how the base expenditure money that increased because the district received so much more money was spent. We’ve been waiting for months for a line-by-line description of where that increase was spent, and we still haven’t received it. To expect a snappy agreement without process would be ridiculous.
Q: So, do you expect this to be a long and protracted process? Is a strike inevitable?
A: Do we want a strike? Hell, no! But do we know that we need to build up our capacity to deal with the kind of intransigence that we’re seeing. Yes, and part of preparing for struggle is building up our capacity and part of building our capacity is Caputo-Pearl: The teachers' view from the new union president:
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| LA Unified St John Deasy “breathtakingly irresponsible.” |