Here’s what’s in the deal that appears to have brought the LAUSD teachers’ strike to an end

Teachers, board members and experts had just begun to scrutinize the landmark deal that effectively ended the Los Angeles Unified School District’s strike on Tuesday.

But one thing is clear: The agreement will call for a complex mix of flexibility and cleverness from the district to secure an influx of new funding from the state and elsewhere to fend off the financial disaster that LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner has been warning of since the day he took office.

The toughest challenge, UTLA negotiator Arlene Inouye said, was the fundamental issue at the heart of the strike: How can a district that’s says it is teetering on the brink of insolvency afford to fund such a deal?

“By working together [with the district], we’re looking at money from the state, we’re looking at money from the county. Our pool of money got bigger,” she said, adding that conversations with Gov. Gavin Newsom and State Superintendent Tony Thurmond were already underway.

This conflict certainly wasn’t all about pay. The district and teachers were actually very close on salary in the final offer the district submitted and teachers spurned, opting instead to head for the picket lines on Jan. 14.

The teachers actually got a little less than the 6.5 percent increase they sought just days before their walkout.

The union agreed to the district’s proposed salary offer of a 6 percent pay raise, which includes a 3 percent boost retroactive to the 2017-18 school year, and another 3 percent retroactive to July 1, 2018. It’s unclear if teachers will be paid for the days they spent on strike.

Classroom size turned out to be the most significant sticking point between the sides. That last pre-strike district offer aimed to spend $130 million to reduce class sizes and add support staff.

The union turned it down, however, because it was only a one-time investment, not a long-range formula.

Tuesday’s agreement requires that most classes be reduced by four students in three years. Some schools with more poignant needs may see a bigger drop.

The deal calls for a class-size reduction in grades four through 12 of one student during the 2019-20 school year. An additional one-student reduction in those classes will take place 2020-21 followed by a two student reduction in the  2021-22 school year.

The new contract also would eliminate language that had previously allowed the district to exceed agreed-upon class-size limits in times of economic hardship.

LAUSD also committed to hire:

• 150 full-time nurses in the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years and 316 nurses in 2021-22 to provide a full-time nurse at every school five days a week.
• 39 librarians in 2019-20 and 2020-21, which would provide a full-time librarian at every secondary school campus five days a week.
• 17 additional full-time counselors by Oct. 1 and 60 additional counselors in 2021-22, creating a counselor-student ratio of 500 to 1 per secondary school according to the union.

The total committed to achieve all these goals: $403 million.

A nationally recognized education expert said the deal shows that teachers were right to push for support staff and reduced class sizes. Initially supportive of the district, Pedro Noguera, an education professor at UCLA, said his opinion changed as the strike unfolded.

“Looking at it from the outside, it seems like the teachers were right to push and they were right — there was more money in the system and outside of the system to address the needs,” he said Noguera.

The agreement  followed six days of contract negotiations and talks with local, county and state leaders to find additional resources to meet the union’s demands, officials said.

“It’s looking at LAUSD in a different way,” Inouye said, describing negotiators’ efforts to find new sources of money.

But where exactly does the additional money come from?  Other levels of government.

The deal calls for the union, district and mayor’s office to jointly push for increases in county and state education funding. Some of those dollars have already been snagged:

• The county Board of Supervisors last week appropriated $10 million for mental health counselors in elementary schools and also requested county staff to find additional funding for more nurses.
• In his budget proposal, Gov. Gavin Newsom allocated $140 million in new funding for the district.
• And it’s unclear if federal dollars could be tapped, though the current adversarial relationship between state officials and President Donald Trump’s administration could complicate that effort.

Beutner, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti and UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl said they would be lobbying state legislators in Sacramento as soon as budget negotiations are underway.

It also calls on the mayor to endorse the Schools and Communities First ballot measure, which will go before voters in November 2020 and would roll back Proposition 13 limits on property taxes for commercial buildings, increasing tax revenue for public education.

For now, all of the teacher’s demands will be funded by the district’s $2 billion reserve fund — a strategy that set off much heated debate over the past two years.

Union leaders called that rainy-day pool unnecessarily huge. But district officials maintained the dollars were set aside to fend off projected financial shortfalls that they considered very real — and imminent.

“We kept pointing to that and saying, ‘You can use that money for what we’re asking,’ Inouye said. “We showed the costs and there was money enough for the nurses, the counselors, the class sizes and so forth.”

Regardless of the renewed effort to seek out additional sources of revenue, LAUSD chief  Beutner said financial challenges did not go away amid the cordial handshakes during Tuesday’s widely watched news conference that set off celebrations on picket lines.

“We have tremendous concerns about insolvency,” Beutner said, “tremendous concerns.”

“But what we were able to do is recognize that part of all this is to balance that with the needs of our students and educators in our schools and the outpouring of support for public education,”Beutner added.

On the issue of charter schools, according to the union, the proposal calls for the LAUSD board  to approve a resolution asking the state to impose a cap on charter schools and to create a governor’s committee on charter schools.

The tentative agreement also calls on the district to provide lists in December and February of each year of schools “threatened by co-location.” At each site on the list, a union “co-location coordinator” will be chosen to be `part of the development of the shared-use agreement.”

The proposal also includes a requirement that the district designate and fund 20 community schools by June 30, and another 10 such schools by June 30, 2020

Will it all work? Garcetti, the negotiations’ impromptu “host,” was confident simply because of the key players engaged in the marathon talks.

Any deal Caputo-Pearl signed off on would have to be good for teachers, the mayor said. And Beutner wouldn’t approve a deal that wasn’t financially responsible, he said.

The deal, it appears, will call for district and union officials to exhibit considerable teamwork, something that hasn’t been evident the past few years.

“We’re going to go to the voters, go to the public and make sure we’ve more resources,” Beutner said, “not just to make sure students do better, but to make sure that we are solvent.”