LAUSD teacher union backs off battle cry, agrees to higher pay raise
United Teachers Los Angeles backed away from its demands for additional educators to help students inside crowded classrooms and, instead, collected a higher pay raise.
Over the next 8½ months, Los Angeles Unified teachers will collect 10.36 percent in pay raises — even more than their union’s request for 8.5 percent and additional negotiations.
The tentative agreement needs to be approved by a majority vote of the Los Angeles Unified School Board and ratified by union members. If passed, it would last for little more than 26 months, expiring July 1, 2017.
In reaching the deal, union leaders backed down from demands for 5,090 new teachers, nurses, counselors and librarians.
LAUSD needed those educators, union leaders have said, because students were suffering in classrooms that were routinely packed with more than 40 students and schools lacked basic support staff.
The demands were prominently featured by union leaders in their campaign “Schools LA Students Deserve” and efforts to organize for a strike.
But the agreement reached Friday evening accepts the district’s long-standing offer to spend $26 million on new teachers and counselors.
Those dollars will be enough to hire just 139 teachers — far less than the 2,510 previously demanded by union leaders. And it will pay for less than half of the 289 additional counselors that union leaders have said are needed for middle and high schools.
Meanwhile, UTLA’s demands for nurses, librarians and other types of counselors — 2,140 in all — were dropped. In their place, UTLA and LAUSD will form a task force to “explore and identify options for increasing and improving health services.”
“This agreement was the right thing for the district to do and the union to do, to take care of some very urgent issues that have been left undealt with over the last several years,” said UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl. “But also to give us the possibility of creating a partnership moving forward.”
The agreement proposes capping the maximum number of students inside most middle and high schools classrooms at 37. Many fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms would ideally be limited to 34 students, while 27 pupils would the maximum for kindergarten through third grade.
But the district can ignore those guidelines, if funding isn’t available, according to the tentative agreement.
District officials have contended for the past year that providing a double-digit pay raise for teachers would require steep cuts and layoffs in the fiscally strapped school district.
As for counselors in middle and high schools, “the district and UTLA share the goal” of one counselor for every 500 students, according to the tentative agreement. Progress toward the 500 to 1 ratio will be reviewed by the superintendent and a task force.
Board member Steven Zimmer said “we’re trying to construct a pathway around class size,” something that’s important to families, students, LAUSD and UTLA.
“But I think it’s also important to look at this agreement in context, and understand, it’s really part of restoring trust and making sure that all teachers know the district believes in them and values them,” Zimmer said.
Over the last seven years, teachers have only received pay raises for longevity. During times of fiscal hardship, the union agreed to furlough days.
The 10.36 percent salary hike will include back pay. The first step toward 10 percent will be a 4 percent hike retroactively dated to July 1, 2014. A second bump of 2 percent will be backdated to Jan. 1. An additional 2 percent will be allotted July 1. And teachers will begin earning 10.36 percent more on Jan. 1.
The typical elementary school teacher earned $75,160 last year, while middle and high school teachers collected slightly less at $75,020, according to W-2 tax records that reflect salary and other types of pay for 2015.
A majority of those teachers’ worked 182 days to earn their salaries, including two without students. They also received 22 paid holidays, according to LAUSD.
In comparison, a full-time employee with two weeks of vacation and six holidays would work 249 days per year.
The pay raise will cost LAUSD more than $250 million per year when it’s fully implemented. It is $87.5 million more than the 6.5 percent raise district officials have previously said LAUSD could afford.
For every percentage point in pay raise, LAUSD could have hired 266 teachers for middle and high schools — a calculation that includes the cost of benefits for those educators.
The agreement has support from the school board, which features three members who face contentious LAUSD teacher union backs off battle cry, agrees to higher pay raise: