After six days on the picket lines, LA’s educators have some huge wins to celebrate. One victory that stands out is the increase to nurse and counselor staffing. LAUSD will hire at least 300 additional nurses in the next two years to guarantee a nurse at every school, five days a week. Plus, their counselor ratios have been reduced from 1:1000+ down to 1:500. They also made big progress in class size. English and math classes at the secondary level will be reduced by seven students, bringing the class-size cap to 39.
Another huge win for public education in LA was the cap on additional charters that was passed by the LAUSD School Board at their first meeting after the end of the strike. This is significant, in that unregulated charter growth costs LAUSD upwards of $600 million every year.
Thankfully, we don’t have those sorts of factors in place at SDUSD—for now. Also, our contract already has things that UTLA was fighting for—like better secondary class size caps, and student-to-counselor ratios. However, that isn’t to say that we do not have disputes with SDUSD. We saw that at the last board meeting when SDUSD’s initial bargaining proposal called for a reduced work year, despite the increased spending for education in the Governor’s proposed budget. We see that in the current fight around special education understaffing. In fact, we have gone to impasse in our last two rounds of bargaining with SDUSD.
Hopefully SDUSD will deal with its educators in a fair way when we begin bargaining again in the next month. No union wishes to go on strike. It is something that is always forced on them by bad employer behavior. If SDUSD deals with its employees, our members, in a fair manner then there is no opening for a strike. Whatever happens, we will stand strong together. There is power in our numbers. Together we are stronger!
