Iran Press/ America: Thousands of teachers and union activists, wearing red, marched down the streets of Los Angeles in rainy weather on Monday, demanding an immediate pay rise of 6.5 percent from the district and the state, to “fully staff” schools with librarians, nurses, counselors and other support personnel, and to reduce class sizes. The union also wants guarantees that public school funding won’t be affected by privatization, New York Times reported.
The strike effectively shut down learning for roughly 500,000 students at 900 schools in the district, the second-largest public school system in the nation. The schools remained open, staffed by substitutes hired by the city, but many parents chose to keep their children at home, either out of support for the strike or because they did not want them inside schools with a skeletal staff.
30,000 Los Angeles teachers strike over pay
“Here we are on a rainy day in the richest country in the world, in the richest state in the country, in a state that’s blue as it can be – and in a city rife with millionaires – where teachers have to go on strike to get the basics for our students,”said Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA).
While the Los Angeles protest looks and feels much like the teacher strikes in Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia and Arizona last April, there is one major difference: unlike those states, seen as important battlegrounds in the 2018 midterms, California is overwhelmingly Democrat.
The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is the second-largest in the US by the number of students, after New York City. In the 2017-18 school year, it had a budget of $7.52 billion and employed 26,046 teachers and 34,194 other employees, including 2,465 administrators.
Los Angeles teachers strike over pay for first time in 30 years
As of 2017, the LAUSD also had $5.1 billion more in liabilities than in assets, mostly due to the mounting health and pension benefits, according to one recent study.
With negotiations apparently at a standstill, the strike could last days or even weeks.
The decision to walk off the job came after months of negotiations between the teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Unified School District. Although educators on all sides agree California should spend more money on education, the union and the district are locked in a bitter feud about how Los Angeles should use the money it already gets.
Although district officials have agreed to come closer to meeting some of the union’s demands, they say fulfilling all of them would bankrupt the system, which is already strained by rising health care and pension costs.
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