LAUSD teachers strike, Day 9: Negotiators work through the night, and joint news conference is sign of hope

A joint news conference set for Tuesday morning sparked hope that the Los Angeles Unified School District teachers strike could be coming to an end.

LA Mayor Eric Garcetti, LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner and United Teachers Los Angeles President Alex Caputo-Pearl were slated to appear together at 9:30 a.m. at City Hall.

The fact that both sides are appearing together could be a sign that an agreement ending the walkout — which is entering its ninth day — is at hand.

Negotiators for the LAUSD and the union representing its 30,000 teachers worked through the night and into Tuesday morning in their effort to hammer out an agreement to end the strike.

Garcetti’s office said that negotiators worked all night before taking a break just after 6 a.m.

“After 21 hours of negotiating at City Hall, bargaining teams from LAUSD and UTLA concluded at 6:13 a.m.,” said a statement from the mayor’s office.

Teachers returned to picket lines early Tuesday, beginning with a protest march at dawn.

Even when a deal is reached, that will not necessarily mean teachers will immediately go back to the classroom. They still need to authorize any deal, just as they authorized the strike that began on Jan. 14. And the school board also needs to review the agreement and sign off on it.

But after two years of going nowhere on teacher demands and a war of words that culminated in “a lack of trust” and the district’s first teacher strike since 1989, these signs of progress proved encouraging for a school system in which student attendance was plummeting and a union whose teachers, after missing five days, not including one holiday, were already showing signals of wanting to get back to the classroom.

The union was demanding a 6.5 percent raise retroactive to one year prior, smaller class sizes, more nurses and and counselors at local campuses, and regulation of charter schools.

The district last Friday presented the union with an offer that included the hiring of 1,200 teachers, capping middle and high school English/math classes at 39 students, capping grades four through six at 35 students, maintaining all other existing class sizes, adding a full-time nurse at every elementary school and adding another academic counselor at high schools.

UTLA officials rejected the proposal, saying it did not go far enough to bolster school staffing, reduce class sizes and prevent them from increasing in the future. The union also blasted the district’s staff-increase proposal for being only a one-year offer, and contended the district’s salary increase proposal is contingent on benefit cuts to future union members.

The LAUSD — the second largest school district in the nation — had offered teachers a 6 percent raise spread over the first two years of a three-year contract. The union disputed the district’s claim it cannot afford more extensive investment in school staffing, pointing to what it calls an estimated $1.8 billion reserve fund and insisting the district has not faced a financial deficit in five years. The district contends that reserve fund is already being spent, in part on the salary increase for teachers.

But on Jan. 14, the day the strike began,  Garcetti — who has no formal authority over the district but parachuted in to help mediate — said the two sides were not that far apart.

He implored them to tone down the rhetoric and get behind closed doors to hash out a deal to a strike that was keeping thousands of students out of school and still others in school, but left to be supervised by a strapped staff of substitutes and administrators.

After a fractious lead-up to the strike, the two sides returned to the negotiating table late Thursday morning following last Monday’s walkout. With the mayor’s office acting as mediator, the opposing teams clashed for more than 12 hours before recessing shortly after midnight.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday’s bargaining sessions also began about 11 a.m. and continued throughout the afternoon and evening; Friday’s talks adjourned after more than 10 hours and Saturday’s after about 11 hours, 30 minutes. Monday, too, was a long session, at one point Garcetti saying they were productive.

With the two sides reportedly having agreed to confidentiality, officials were tight-lipped.

“The activism here cannot end. It must not end,” LAUSD board president Monica Garcia said last week. “The strike, however, it does need to end. We need our teachers and our children back at school doing the work that they need to do.”

On Monday, the union said it has a system in place through which a tentative agreement could be approved by its members “over a period of hours,” but called on them to return to picket lines Tuesday morning.

The union also had public events planned Tuesday, including a 6 a.m. march with firefighters followed by a news conference and rally with a march from City Hall to school district headquarters.

As teachers were to get back to the picket lines, all of the district 1,240 K-12 schools were scheduled to be open Tuesday, said LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner.

“Los Angeles Unified has been working around the clock over the past days and weeks to solve the outstanding issues with UTLA,” Beutner said in a statement Monday. “We remain committed to doing everything we can to solve the issues and get all of our students and educators back in the classroom.”