Bargaining: LAUSD Continues to Fight for Status Quo

UTLA’s 85-member Expanded Bargaining Team met with LAUSD yesterday for the first in-person bargaining session since before the pandemic

Yesterday the team reached a tentative agreement on 3 articles:

• Article XXX: Special Committees – providing a venue and voice for CSPP educators and those working in co-located schools.
• Article XII: Leaves and Absences – increasing access to the Catastrophic Illness Donation Fund from once in a career to twice, in the very unfortunate instance where that is necessary for an educator.
• Article X: Educator Development, Support, and Evaluation – ensuring that no UTLA member will be responsible for evaluating another UTLA member and establishing a work group to develop recommendations on a better evaluation system for itinerant UTLA members.

While some agreements were reached, it is clear that LAUSD does not share our vision to improve educators’ working conditions and students’ learning conditions. 

We cannot return to the status quo where educators never have time to do everything that is required of their position. However, the solutions that LAUSD have brought to the table center on educators spending longer hours on campus and not much more. Our proposals are based on providing more time to plan and prepare, more professional flexibility, and more support.

Our bargaining team focused on two parts of the contract to improve educator working conditions to make our work more sustainable and truly go Beyond Recovery. The demands our team brought to the bargaining table are rooted in fairness, equity, respect, and recognition of the workloads we all carry:

• Limit the time out-of-classroom educators are providing coverage and supervision so they have time to do their job. Out-of-classroom educators should be paid for class coverage, just like classroom teachers.
• Increase collaboration and planning time during the school day, not by adding extra hours.
• End combo classes.
• Respect the work of all educators and compensate for extra work spent covering classes, just as classroom educators are compensated.
• Add planning time for elementary teachers in line with what other districts have. In recognition that the size of LAUSD may complicate a uniform approach, our team proposed language that allows each school the flexibility to develop their own plan for adequate planning time.
• Make hours and duties more manageable to recruit and retain educators for fully staffed schools.

UTLA member leaders from Adult Education also helped present a proposal to reach better alignment with what other K-12 educators are provided in terms of of assignments, compensation for split shifts, and other rights.

We demand LAUSD work with us to address every element of our Beyond Recovery platform – Salary, Class Size and Staffing, Testing, Equity for Schools and Communities, Community Schools and Targeted Supports. LAUSD will only respond to educators, parents, and the community demonstrating that we have the power to win our demands.