The Win Our Future platform is the path to a stable and sustainable future for our public schools. Last week, the 140-member UTLA bargaining team met with the district to introduce proposals developed from the Win Our Future Platform. On Friday, they introduced a proposal to overhaul LAUSD’s broken salary schedule. 

Currently, the district’s salary schedule fails to attract and retain enough educators to fully staff our schools. The starting salary is too low to keep up with the cost of living in Los Angeles and surrounding areas. Over 55% of educators who chose to leave at the end of last school year had only worked in LAUSD for four years or less. 

Graph: Step increases are totally inconsistent, nonsensical, and extremely low — especially in the early years.

On the current schedule, educators who stay in LAUSD for more than ten years must attain 98 salary points (the equivalent of two master’s degrees) by taking workshops and classes to continue getting yearly increases on the anniversary of their date of hire.

Graph: After year ten, educators must attain 98 salary points to advance to the next step increase or stay trapped at step ten forever.

Last Friday, the UTLA member bargaining team presented a proposal to the district that would: 

  • raise starting salaries on every salary table by at least 16% (to $80,000 on the T-Table); 
  • make step increases more consistent across years of service and earned salary points; 
  • raise step increases early on to earn more, faster; 
  • lower the hurdle for advancement past year ten from 98 to the industry standard of 70 salary points; 
  • and more to fix the broken salary schedule. 

Graph: The proposal was developed to fix the current salary schedule by making step increases between rows and columns consistent and higher increases earlier on to receive the highest salaries sooner.

More than half of educators in the UTLA bargaining unit are on the T table, but the fixes in this proposal extend to every table in our contract — Special Education (SE), Nurse (N), Nurse Practitioner (NP), Early Education (C), Adult Education (THR), Alt Certification (L), and Special Services (D) — plus increases the daily rate for substitute educators by 16%. 

Overall, this proposal would result in an average pay increase of 21% over two years, with 18% on average in year one. All changes to the salary tables have been proposed for year one of the contract (July 1, 2025) plus a 3% across the board increase in year 2 (July 1, 2026). 

At its core, this bold and strategic salary proposal is about valuing educators, strengthening the profession, and fully staffing our schools. 

Review all bargaining summaries and full proposals on the bargaining updates page.