As the Los Angeles Unified School District and local teachers union continue to negotiate over what the school day will look like come fall, United Teachers Los Angeles this week presented the district with a proposal which the union president said would provide supports that students will need as they recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
The parties are bargaining on conditions to return to “a traditional model for next school year,” UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz said during her weekly update on Friday, May 21.
“The district has signaled that it plans to fully reopen with an overwhelming majority of staff and students physically attending school five days per week unless pandemic conditions change for the worse,” she said, noting that a virtual schooling option will remain for students that wish to continue learning remotely.
There has been mounting pressure from parents for schools to offer full-day in-person instruction five days a week at all grade levels this fall. Some parents and students plan to rally outside the district’s headquarters on Sunday before marching to the UTLA office to make their demands known.
In her update, Myart-Cruz also noted that the union has presented the district with a proposal to provide additional supports, which she said students will need “for a healthy, healing and equitable return” to school.
Among the things the union is demanding is that the district maintain health and safety protocols, such as masking requirements, physical distancing, proper ventilation, cleaning and disinfecting of school facilities, and ongoing COVID-19 testing.
Myart-Cruz did not specify if the union will agree to less than 6 feet of distancing between desks — a current practice that has prevented the district from allowing whole classes of students to return to the classroom at the same time.
The union also proposed:
- Lowering class sizes by hiring 1,000 more teachers;
- Helping students deal with the trauma they’ve faced from the pandemic by hiring 1,800 new psychologists, counselors, psychiatric social workers and others;
- Hiring 300 new special education providers and 300 more designated instructional services employees to work with students with disabilities, along with 50 new art educators to provide art, music and drama instruction;
- Providing stability to students by putting on hold the practice of transferring teachers to another campus in response to enrollment demands; and
- Barring combination classes so elementary school teachers aren’t teaching two grade levels at once.
In addition, UTLA proposed that the district offer signing bonuses and ongoing salary increases to attract and retain educators.
“We have to grapple with a historic shortage of educators in the labor market, a trend that has been exacerbated by the grueling year of our learning communities,” Myart-Cruz said. “We must figure out how to attract and retain educators.”
Superintendent Austin Beutner recently raised the issue of finding enough qualified candidates to hire and warned that money alone won’t solve every problem.
While the district is poised to receive a record level of state and federal dollars in the form of COVID-19 relief aid, the money won’t matter if the people needed to do the work aren’t available for hiring, he said during his weekly update to the community on Monday.
For example, the district would, ideally, hire 400 to 500 more reading specialists yet fewer than 200 people graduate with a reading specialist certificate each year in the state, he said. Similarly, for LAUSD to add a mental health counselor to every Title I school and a second one to the highest-needs campuses, it would need to hire 1,000 more counselors, which is more than two-thirds the number of qualified people who graduate from such programs in California each year, he said.
“Money alone isn’t the answer,” he said. “For the additional school funding to have the impact we all want to see, it will require the largest effort in teacher training and development, both for new and existing teachers, in more than a generation.”
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May 22, 2021 at 07:00PM
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UTLA in negotiations with LAUSD over ‘traditional’ school day for fall - LA Daily News
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