LAUSD strike is off, schools open Tuesday

A strike that would have shut down schools for nearly 400,000 students was averted at the eleventh hour early Tuesday after the Los Angeles Unified School District reached a tentative agreement with the union that represents workers including custodians, bus drivers and cafeteria workers.

Schools in the nation’s second-largest school district were open as usual on Tuesday, to the relief of many families who had scrambled to make childcare arrangements.

The tentative agreement, which includes a 24% increase over three years, was the final milestone needed to avert a walkout, after the union representing teachers and another representing administrators struck deals on Sunday. It came after a tense night of uncertainty as the two sides faced off at the bargaining table, with the breakthrough announced at 2 a.m., just hours before the start of the school day.

During a mid-morning news conference, Mayor Karen Bass — who said she stepped into the negotiations to avoid a disruptive work stoppage — praised the unions and the district, adding that she was a “proud LAUSD graduate, parent and grandparent” who was happy that her grandson was in class.

“It’s been a long night and it’s been a long few weeks of negotiations, but our schools are open, our kids are in class, and school workers are on the job caring for and shaping the minds of our future,” she said.

Both United Teachers Los Angeles and Associated Administrators of Los Angeles were prepared to strike in solidarity if Local 99 of Service Employees International Union did not reach an agreement.

All three deals still need to be ratified by union members and by the LAUSD Board of Education.

The school district announced the tentative agreement with Local 99 in an alert just five hours before employees were scheduled to picket outside their campuses.

Half an hour later, at 2:30 a.m., Local 99 said on social media: “Because of your unity and readiness to take action, we secured major wins for our members — including significant improvements to wages and hours, stronger protections against subcontracting, increased staffing, and we successfully stopped layoffs for IT workers. This is what collective power looks like.”

The statement added, “For tomorrow: All members should report to work as usual.”

Local 99 represents the lowest-paid employees in the school system: about 30,000 workers who also include special education aides, gardeners and tech support staff. Their average annual salary is about $35,000, although the jobs typically include health benefits for union members and their immediate families. The union said that many of its members don’t make a living wage and have taken on second jobs to make ends meet in an expensive city.

In addition to the salary increase, the new contract includes increased work hours to ensure that employees and their families qualify for healthcare benefits; rescinding the layoffs of hundreds of tech support workers; and limitations on the subcontracting of work that can be done by union members.

On Tuesday, the morning drop-off at Brentwood Elementary Science Magnet felt routine, in contrast to the uncertainty many families felt just hours earlier. Parents and students lugged backpacks and science projects. School buses — driven by Local 99 members who would have been on strike — lined the curb.

“I mean, thumbs-up,” said Logan Highland, who smiled as he dropped off his children at the school entrance.

Rachel Friedman, a parent and special education assistant in the district, said the outcome was what many staffers and families had hoped for.

“No one wants to go on strike. We don’t want to stop schools,” she said. “We just want to be paid what we’re worth. Better paid employees are happier employees, and that’s better for students, too.”

Wendy Diaz-Antonio, a community representative at Patrick Henry Middle School in Granada Hills who is on the Local 99 bargaining team, said the deal brought a “huge sense of relief, because we didn’t want to strike, but we were ready to strike if it needed to be.”

Diaz-Antonio, the mother of two LAUSD high schoolers, said she had planned for relatives to drive from more than an hour away to pick up her kids and care for them while school was out and she was on the picket lines.

Details on the two other deals

The three unions, each with separate contracts, cover about 70,000 of the district’s 83,300 employees and nearly all campus workers. Their pact to walk out together if any of them could not reach a deal was the first in L.A. Unified history.

UTLA represents about 37,000 teachers, nurses, counselors, psychologists and librarians. The union said the average pay increase for its members will be 13.86% over a two-year pact and that the annual salary of a starting teacher would immediately rise to $77,000 from $68,965 — an 11.7% jump.

The new UTLA contract will also add more than 450 attendance counselors, psychiatric social workers, school psychologists and counselor positions. The contract includes provisions to control class sizes for students with disabilities, including extra pay for teachers whose classes exceed the cap.

AALA represents about 3,000 administrators, including principals and assistant principals. Their deal includes a pay increase of 11.65% over two years and an opportunity to bargain for an additional raise in the final year of the three-year contract.

Families stressed, confused

For days, families across the sprawling district expressed frustration with what they said was inadequate and disjointed communication from district officials about the potential school closures. Some said they heard from teachers and individual campus administrators; others were completely unaware.

Caden Chernoff, a mother of two LAUSD students in the San Fernando Valley, said it “was insane” for the district to expect families and employees to stay up all night to learn whether campuses would be open the next morning.

“Why did it have to be this eleventh hour thing when they could have come to this agreement two weeks ago?” she said. “I don’t really understand the necessity for both sides to use 400,000 families as a pawn in their last-minute fight.”

Chernoff, a professional advisor for parents navigating enrollment, runs a Facebook page called the L.A. Kindergarten Class with about 3,500 followers.

At 10:10 p.m. Monday, she wrote: “NO ONE KNOWS IF SCHOOLS WILL BE OPEN IN THE MORNING. Parents are losing it. Not a peep from the district. This is NOT NORMAL!!!!!”

After conking out around 1:30 a.m., she awoke to post: “Sorry Kiddos, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN TODAY!”

She said she heard from several angry parents who kept their kids home anyway, because they had already paid for a babysitter or made other plans.

At Hobart Boulevard Elementary School in Koreatown on Tuesday, a mother dropping off her 9-year-old son said she did not know about the potential strike until the boy told her Monday.

She works in a warehouse and commutes an hour by bus. Her boss is understanding of emergencies with her kids, she said, but it is a hassle when plans change.

“I thought it was weird the school didn’t say anything,” the mother, who would not give her name, citing her immigration status, said in Spanish. “I would have had to stay home with him and miss a workday.”

Alondra Escobar, whose 5- and 7-year-olds also attend Hobart, said she, too, was unaware of the possible strike until Tuesday morning.

Escobar, who is certified in child development but not working for a school, said she would have brought her kids to the picket lines.

Raises for school staff are “well-deserved,” she said.