With LAUSD’s teachers ready to strike, Southern California school districts are watching

As nearly 30,000 teachers stand ready to take to the picket lines in the Los Angeles Unified School district on Monday, districts from the Inland Empire to Orange County will be watching.

The strike might not inspire copycats, but the issues that have been brewing in L.A. —from class size to salary to the growth of charter schools to rising pension costs — are ringing familiar in places like San Bernardino, Santa Ana, San Gabriel Valley and other districts that neighbor the nation’s second largest school system.

Read full LAUSD strike coverage here

Will others take cues from what’s happening in a district with more than half a million students? That wasn’t clear. No doubt L.A. Unified is a giant school system that spans more than 700 square miles, from the San Fernando Valley to San Pedro. With 621,414 students, it dwarfs its neighbors.

“There are aspects to the LA strike that are unique to Los Angeles,” said Bradley D. Marianno, an assistant professor of Educational Leadership & Policy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

But as L.A.’s strike date approached, it was clear that there’s solidarity among educators in districts large and small with United Teachers Los Angeles’ push for a pay hike, smaller class sizes and more nurses and counselors. And there’s a corresponding collective message that investment in public education is lacking.

“Class size is an issue that teachers all over the nation have been concerned with, so we’re watching to see what happens there,” said Ashley Bettas-Alcalá, president of the San Bernardino Teachers Association. “It’s not just about salaries: It’s also about having enough nurses and librarians for our students.”

In L.A., teachers are seeking a 6.5 percent raise, retroactive to 2016, and their union is standing firm on demands to reduce class size and regulate charter schools.

“Highly qualified teachers, class sizes that are reasonable, that promote learning, that sort of thing,” said Barbara Pearson, the president of the Santa Ana Educators’ Association. “And those are issues that are not unique to UTLA; they’re all of our issues.”

Districts, still feeling the pain from the last recession, have in many cases doubled down on austerity during the recovery and as they prepare for the next economic downturn.

“It’s one thing about being fiscally conservative, and it’s one thing to pat yourself on the back about how much you’re able to scrimp and cut back on,” said Billie Joe Wright, the president of the Hacienda La Puente Teachers Association. When it comes to district reserves LA Unified and others districts have to justify “the amount of money they’re sitting on and not putting into the classroom.”

Meanwhile, California’s public school districts have mostly recovered from the damage done by the deep cuts during the Great Recession, which saw more than 32,000 teachers in California cut between the 2007 and 2012 school years, according to California’s Legislative Analysts Office. In many cases, districts have shored up their reserves to prepare for the next recession, which many economists predict will hit the United States by 2020, or to help deal with spiking pension costs.

But for Southern California teachers who still remember receiving provisional layoff notices a decade ago — in some districts, every teacher was pink-slipped — those reserves can look like back pay.

“In a lot of districts in California, you’re seeing districts with increasing reserves and you’re seeing unions saying ‘hey, we want a piece of that,’” Marianno said.

Yet, again, it’s a reason surrounding districts can relate with L.A., where the union has vehemently pushed back on Superintendent Austin Beutner’s troubling financial outlooks for his district, despite a $1.8 billion reserve.

Beutner says meeting all of the union’s demands would essentially bankrupt the district, which is already in a deficit, and force a state takeover. And that’s not counting other costs, like pension obligations.

But the union’s president, Alex Caputo-Pearl, isn’t buying it. He makes a point of saying that the dire picture the district has painted in recent years has never really come about. Meanwhile, he says, the district is holding onto its reserves and not putting chunks of that reserve funding back into the classroom.

National news leads to local action

All this is happening in a national climate that’s seen multiple high-profile strikes in the past two years, as well as court cases seen as attacks on labor unions.

“They’re helping to shine a light on what schools are going through. This isn’t about unions, this isn’t about districts, so much as it is about public education,” said Wright. “The state of public education, in terms of funding, is nowhere near where it needs to be.”

In June 2018, in Janus v. AFSCME, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled non-union public employees can’t be forced to pay union fees, depriving those unions of revenue while, supporters say, still giving those employees all the benefits the union has won for them. It was the latest in a series of lawsuits that teachers unions viewed as attacks on public teachers, including Vergara v. California, where the state supreme court upheld California’s teacher tenure and school funding laws in 2016.

“What I think has given the union confidence to drag this on longer is the national news,” Marianno said.

And years of austerity, or even outright cuts, in public education in Arizona, Kentucky, Oklahoma and West Virginia have led to well-publicized strikes.

“Given the recent activism, unions are more emboldened to use strike tactics. Strikes are very uncommon in education, but at least in the past year, they’ve become more common,” Marianno said. “Strikes have been become more viable as a tactic and unions are using it.”

A matter of trust … or not

A recent report that evaluated the contract proposals of the two sides in L.A. Unified’s dispute found a “lack of trust” was plaguing contract talks between the union and the district. Beutner himself told the Southern California News Group in editorial meeting that he was disturbed that after two years of talks, the two sides can’t even agree on the facts facing the district.

But the bad relationship between the union and district officials that has helped bring Los Angeles Unified to the brink isn’t the case everywhere.

In 2017, the Santa Ana Unified school board voted to give layoff notices to 287 teachers and other educators. But things are better today, according to Pearson — of the Santa Ana Educators’ Association – who said that, “as of now,” things are “stable” between the union and district.

Others around Southern California rang a similar note.

“I think we’ve had some pretty positive labor-management relationships over the years,” San Bernardino’s Bettas-Alcalá said. “We’ve worked very well with the district with Dr. (Dale) Marsden as our superintendent.”

Fostering healthy relationships requires work. District officials meet with union leaders roughly twice a month in San Bernardino to air issues.

“It’s an ongoing collaboration. We’re texting, we’re calling, we’re making sure that we’re transparent with each other,” said Perry Wiseman, San Bernardino City Unified’s Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources. “

The thinking is that building such ties will pay off later, even save money and protect programs.

Hacienda La Puente teachers almost had a strike several years ago and they and the district were determined to fix their relationship.

“There was a determination between the union and the district to look at every avenue and build trust along the way,” said Wright, fresh from his monthly meeting with the district superintendent.

That sort of effort over the years might have headed off the situation in Los Angeles today.

“This could have been resolved earlier, but with the lack of trust on all sides … that led to this strike,” Marianno said.