Today we bring you a story of another school district, in a not far-off land… A district that offers educators the most competitive pay in its region, with K-12 and Special Education pay topping out at $137k and $146k respectively.¹ This district has a labor agreement that provides fully employer-paid health insurance for employees and dependents as well as retiree health benefits. It pays the highest daily rate for substitutes in the country ($393/day); has contractually agreed to class size caps, and strong protections against subcontracting of union work—forbidding the district from entering any outside contracts for services that would normally be covered by bargaining unit workers. It also has groundbreaking new language around AI that protects students and educators by requiring the district to obtain the express written agreement of the union before implementing any AI that could be used to replace bargaining unit work.

You may be asking yourself, dear reader, “surely this must be some wealthy district situated in a small coastal town or wealthy enclave…how else could they afford their workers such luxuries?!” Dear reader, this is no such district. It is none other than our fellow large urban school district and member of the statewide California Alliance for Community Schools, the Sacramento City Unified School District. Despite working with a district facing many of the same challenges as LAUSD, like declining enrollment and the expiration of federal COVID funding, the Sacramento City Teachers Association (SCTA) bargained an exemplary contract, and the Sac City School district has set an example for other districts to follow.  

Of particular interest to the UTLA research department are the financial conditions under which this contract was negotiated. The building blocks of Sacramento’s competitive compensation plan were first laid two contract cycles ago during negotiations in 2017. At the time, Sacramento was faced with a peculiar situation where their starting and ending pay was both relatively competitive, but teachers were at big loss compared to neighboring districts in their mid-career salary steps. To address this, SCTA did what UTLA members are currently trying to do: they overhauled their entire salary schedule.

Prior to the restructuring, Sacramento teachers had to wait 30 years to reach the top of the scale, and their year-to-year raises were not consistent or predictable. (The current pay schedule at LAUSD has similar features.) SCTA compressed the scale to top out at 20 years of service and introduced a rational raise schedule of 3.5% for each successive year of service and 5% for each step between salary point classes. After winning the new tables in 2017, and cementing the implementation in a 2019 arbitration, SCTA won additional across the board raises that have put them in such a competitive position as of their latest agreement.  

SCUSD has been able to provide fair compensation without triggering the kind of financial crisis that LAUSD is consistently warning us about. Back in 2017 SCUSD was deploying the same kind of cliched tropes about a coming fiscal cliff and burgeoning unfunded liabilities, yet after settling these labor agreements, the district has been just fine. Over the past five years, in relative terms, SCUSD has kept around a third to a half of the amount of money in reserve that LAUSD has (see below). SCUSD was even able to pass a positively certified budget this past June. 

One possible reason for the difference is how SCUSD chooses to spend its money, specifically what it doesn’t spend money on. One of the biggest contributing factors to LAUSD’s deficit in 2024-25 aside from greatly decreased federal revenue, was a 27% increase in spending on “Professional/Consulting Services.” Before the pandemic, LAUSD was spending between $200 and $250 million on such services. In 2024-25, according to the district’s latest estimate, they spent $719 million. While most districts, LAUSD included, saw a big increase in spending on services during the pandemic (on things like COVID testing, remote learning, etc.) that spending has begun to fall off as the need for such services subsides. At LAUSD, spending continues to grow. As a portion of total spending, LAUSD spends twice as much SCUSD on professional/consulting services: 

Perhaps one reason that SCUSD spends less money on contracting out is that there is much greater transparency in Sacramento when it comes to contracting out. Unlike LAUSD, SCUSD includes complete copies of contracts the district is considering in publicly available materials for board meetings. Thanks to a clause in the Sacramento City Teachers Association (SCTA) collective bargaining agreement, the district cannot enter any contract with outside service providers that could possibly displace work done by the bargaining unit without the expressed written consent of SCTA. Meanwhile, LAUSD does not even have a website with a searchable archive of meeting materials and minutes, like most school districts a fraction of its size. 

Again, as a fellow large urban school district, SCUSD faces the same macro-level challenges as LAUSD. Enrollment is declining, most students fall into one of the California Department of Education’s categories for “unduplicated pupils” (eligible for free and reduced-price meals, are English language learners, or are foster children), and the district is dependent on the same contingent revenue streams (state and federal) as LAUSD. Still, facing all those headwinds and with much lower percentage of reserves, Sac City managed to come to settlement without a strike, and one that has strong standards for pay, benefits, and working conditions very similar to what educators at LAUSD proposed. Thanks to these practices, the Sacramento community benefits from a great school district that doesn’t hoard money or spend cash on private companies that fail to enrich student experiences. Unlike LAUSD, it spends 55% or more of its money on the classroom, as required by state law: