A recent UTLA demonstration. (Photo: UTLA website)

UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl welcomed teachers to the new school year and urged them to get involved in a media campaign for late August, according to a recorded robo-call that went out last night.

In the recorded message by Caputo-Pearl sent out Sunday night before teachers return to school, he complimented teachers for the “amazing people and work in our public schools” throughout the district.

He also said union chapter meetings will be held starting the second week of school that will discuss the unprecedented media campaign and call for possible demonstrations later in the school year. The school district may be involved with a nationwide “walk-in” in October as they did last year.

• Read more: UTLA president’s aggressive 10-point plan for upcoming battles

The UTLA president also repeated his call that “billionaires should not be driving the public school agenda,” talking about wealthy Californians who the union says undermine public schools.

The robo-call is meant for the 31,000 teachers represented in district schools and some charter schools at LA Unified.

Starting late August and running through the month of September, the UTLA public relations campaign will include billboards, posters and online messages that will feature union members, students and parents from the district.

Their social media campaign will use #wearepublicschools. The plan for the campaign is to create a “positive public narrative around the great things happening in our district public schools, featuring educators, students and parents, while beating back the corporate charter narrative and to share our vision for fully funded neighborhood community schools.”

The union is calling for a 10 percent salary bump for 2014-15, with the expectation of re-opening pay negotiations next year. Smaller class sizes, salary raises and an end to teacher jail are among key components the union is seeking it its new contract.

“Our budget calculations show that the proposal would cost more than $800 million in 2015-16,” said Vivian Ekchian, the district’s Chief Labor Negotiator. “Combined with a projected $365 million deficit next year, agreeing to the union’s proposal would deal a devastating blow to the District’s educational programs.”

The union’s new wage demand exceeds the district’s standing offer of a 6.64 percent salary increase over the next three years plus a one-time 2 percent bonus.

Another topic UTLA returned to during talks yesterday was the issue of “teacher jail.”

The union wants the district to roll back the current policy, which yanks teachers under investigation from the classroom regardless of the type of charges against them. A more fair system, the union argued, is to remove only those teachers facing allegations of sexual misconduct, physical violence, or other serious criminal acts from classroom assignments, while teachers with performance, competence or judgment issues be allowed to stay in the classroom.

“The District will examine this proposal from the lens of our students’ safety and well-being,” Ekchian said.

The session included a “guest speaker” on the union side. Judith Perez, president of the Associated Administrators of of Los Angeles, the principals and school administrators union, which does not agree with UTLA on every issue. Her topic, according to the UTLA website, was “the need for more collaboration.”

Noting a new sense of urgency to get a deal on salary increases for teachers by winter break, the district suggested expedited bargaining sessions and leaving all non-economic issues open for discussion until the start of 2015.

While UTLA agreed to meet three times over the next six weeks, starting Nov. 6, the union offered no public response to the district’s position that new demands are fiscally unsound.

And it remains unclear what, if any progress, might be made in the coming weeks. The union has already planned a day of action on Nov. 20, which suggests that the union does not foresee concluding a deal any time soon.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who delivered a speech about a post-Deasy LA Unified on Wednesday, told LA School Report that UTLA’s action days are unrelated to the negotiation process.

“What UTLA is doing is mending a lot of the divisiveness and the polarization that some of the powers that be in the city — former Mayor (Antonio) Villaraigosa, John Deasy, and Eli Broad — created,” she said.

“So the unions push to have these kinds of actions is a very important part of being a part of the community,” she added.

Previous posts: LAUSD says teacher contract demands unaffordable, union disagrees; UTLA calls for smaller class sizes at a morning press event

North Hollywood HS PE teacher Brad Hodge speaks today at a press event about class sizes. (Via UTLA Facebook page)

United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) President Alex Caputo-Pearl appeared at a press conference today outside North Hollywood High School where he and other speakers focused on the union’s demand for smaller class sizes in its ongoing fight for a new contract.

Caputo-Pearl said that the most fundamental thing the union wants to communicate is “that our students are human beings that deserve personalized attention,” KNX 1070 reported.

The press event came as union and LA Unified officials are set to meet for another contract bargaining session tomorrow, the first since John Deasy resigned as superintendent and was replaced with Ray Cortines on an interim basis.

Smaller class sizes, salary raises and an end to teacher jail are among key components the union is seeking it its new contract, which is outlined in UTLA’s Schools LA Students Deserve campaign.

Students and teachers at North Hollywood High spoke at the press conference and talked about the troubles large class sizes are causing. Ninth grader John Huddleston said his physical education class has over 50 students.

“It takes the teacher so long to take attendance that it truly does cut into our class curriculum time,” said Huddleston, according to KNX.

UTLA said in a statement that thousands of students and teachers around the district were wearing stickers today that highlighted their class size and student/teacher ratios, KNBC reported.

When speaking to LA School Report yesterday, Caputo-Pearl was hesitant to characterize the change in superintendents as a positive or negative in terms of the union’s bargaining position.

“We are looking forward to talking to the interim superintendent about some positive direction about this,” Caputo-Pearl said. “I don’t want to speculate, just whoever the superintendent is, interim or permanent, we are going to continue to bring the issues that are affecting students, schools and educators to the table and we look forward to productive negotiations around that.”

Captuo-Pearl did say that he will continue to aggressively pursue a new contract even though Cortines is an interim superintendent.

“The condition that our schools find themselves in in terms of class size, in terms of schools not having nurses and librarians, educators that have not gotten a pay increase for seven years, that absolutely determines for us that we have got to pursue our Schools LA Students Deserve campaign aggressively,” he said.

Listen to the full report KNX report here:

Students at Jefferson High School stage a walkout to protest scheduling problems on Aug. 25, 2014. (Credit: Vanessa Romo)

The scheduling mess at Jefferson High School emerged for many more reasons than a troubled new computer system, district officials and school administrators told LA School Report today.

Contributing factors included the loss of several key grants, which created a shortage in teachers, money and available class periods; the teachers’ refusal to make scheduling changes and a reshuffling of Jefferson’s administrators just weeks before school started.

“This is definitely not a MiSiS issue,” Tommy Chang, Superintendent of Intensive Support and Innovation Center for LA Unified, said in an interview. “It’s also a master schedule issue. Scheduling issues caused by MiSiS only exacerbated the situation on this campus.”

District officials, teachers and administrators have been meeting for days to craft an action plan to eliminate further disruption at Jefferson. Their result of their collaboration is scheduled to be presented to the district school board when it meets tomorrow.

Jefferson’s daily schedule is almost unique among LA Unified high schools. It includes two teacher conferences a day rather than the more typical one. When Jefferson teachers were given an opportunity earlier this year to vote to change to a more traditional daily schedule, which district officials said would have alleviated many of the problems that have left students with empty class time, they refused.

In 2010, Jefferson became part of more than two dozen schools that the school board put up for bid to be run by outside groups as part of the Public School Choice program, and the Jefferson bid went to a group of LA Unified teachers, parents and administrators who crafted the school’s plan with help from UTLA leadership.

At the time, the school was being supported by a federal School Improvement grant and a state grant through the Quality Education Investment Act. The state grant netted the school over $8.5 million from 2009-2012 but has expired; and the federal grant, after bringing in millions, will only contribute about $12,000 this school year, according to Lydia Ramos, director of communications at LA Unified.

Under the agreement between UTLA and the district, teachers at Jefferson chose an eight-period day, with two periods set aside each day for teacher conferences, and the two grants helped support it.

“Right now, they teach six classes and have two conference periods. That is uncommon,” said Ramos said.

While media headlines and the teachers union have pointed an accusatory finger at Superintendent John Deasy and the district’s new MiSiS computer system as the culprit for the scheduling problems, leading a judge last week to order immediate fixes, little focus has been placed on the role the teachers and the school’s unusual schedule have played.

“[The extra conference period] usually requires extra funding to support,” Ramos said. “And when they lost their funding, that became a challenge for them because there wasn’t the money to pay for the auxiliary periods.”

With Jefferson’s current schedule, students have about 8 percent less class time than peers in other high schools, Ramos said.

“Because they don’t have the money now, they are not offering enough classes for the kids because they are holding tight to their conference periods, and they voted on that,” said Michelle Windmueller, a lead instructional director in the district’s Intensive Support and Innovation Center who was assigned to Jefferson over the summer. “This is a UTLA issue. It’s part of the collective bargaining agreement that they get to vote on their calendar, and you have to stay with it unless they vote on it again, and this staff is not willing to vote on this again and change mid-year. They are sticking to it.”

Further, Jefferson’s annual budget is determined through a collaborative process that includes administrators and teachers.

UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl did not respond to a request to comment on this story.

With the role teachers’ extra conference period coming to light, it appears clear that the Jefferson scheduling mess could be compared to a plane crash, as crash investigators often note that multiple factors — none fatal on their own — combine at once and lead to the accident.

In its first few years, the schedule allowed students who were on track to graduate to go home for free periods, or to have “service” periods to perform administrative tasks. But with the loss of the grants and available teachers, there was was “no money to support classes for kids who did not want to ‘go home’ or use an empty period for ‘service.'” Chang said.

Chang insisted that it was a combination of factors that led to the scheduling mess.

“Jefferson was the district’s toughest place because of the confluence of all the issues,” he said. “We’re still doing a pretty good job of getting kids in the right classes, but I wouldn’t call it a disaster.”

Others have, including the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles (AALA), the principals union, which in a recent newsletter item, “A Recipe for Disaster,” pointed out how the group believed administrative turnover played a large role in the scheduling problems.

According to the AALA newsletter, Jefferson’s principal and assistant principal of secondary counseling (ASPCS) services were replaced on June 30 with an interim principal who is a retired elementary school principal and inexperienced in high school block scheduling.

The new ASPCS was not allowed to start school until July 28 and was then replaced on Aug. 14 with a new instructional specialist. A permanent principal, Jack Foote, was not assigned to the school until Aug. 19, several days after classes began.

The Jefferson problems “can be traced to the fact the the leadership of the district made some late changes in administration at the school,” Dan Isaacs, a spokesman for AALA, told LA School Report. “When you make administrative changes, those changes should be made in April or May, or certainly when the school year comes to an end, so there’s some degree of interaction between the people going in and going out.”

In a letter sent today to the school board and Deasy that included an overall assessment of the scheduling problems and solutions, Chang wrote that the change in principals was due to Jefferson being named a Core Waiver school in the 2013-14 school year and a review found that a leadership change was necessary, but that “the position took longer to fill than a normal vacancy” because the Core Waiver requires additional management skills in a principal.

Further muddying the waters was a recent letter from Deasy to the judge presiding over a lawsuit, Cruz vs. California, that is seeking to restore quality instruction time in schools around the state. Deasy expressed support for the student plaintiffs. Jefferson is now part of the lawsuit, and by his support, Deasy criticized a district school’s policy of allowing students to take periods with no educational content. The move baffled both the UTLA and AALA.

In a press release, UTLA accused Deasy of supporting the lawsuit to “obscure his role in the school’s destabilization.”

Vanessa Romo and Michael Janofsky contributed to this report. 

The new demand of 10 percent a year for one year came last week, superseding the union’s previous demand of 17.6 percent over two years.

Rob Samples, Assistant Director of Labor Relations for LA Unified, said UTLA’s proposal plus its request for an annual stipend of $1,000 per educator to cover out-of-pocket expenses for classroom supplies, would run about $250 million a year while the annual stipend would cost the district about $43 million per year.

“All together that adds up to $876 million over three years,” he told LA School Report.

In a statement, district officials said that “when combined with other projected deficits, the total impact is at least $1.35 billion over three years.” The statement did not discuss other contributors to the projected deficit.

In any case, the district said, the union demands would force the district to make numerous cuts in other areas in order to pay for the salary proposals.

“The idea is to give UTLA a more realistic view of what their ask is,” Samples said. “Because it’s not just about a 10 percent raise for one year. These are on-going costs that will go up over time and we have to look at the long-term picture.”

UTLA president, Alex Caputo-Pearl, countered the district assertions today, insisting that the district budgets are a reflection of its priorities, which he suggests are out of whack.

“LAUSD spends too much money on John Deasy vanity projects, including the army of foot soldier bureaucrats in his ‘talent division’, the nearly 700 displaced educators who are still waiting for an assignment, and the additional hundreds of educators sitting in Deasy’s ‘teacher jail’ waiting months or years for due process,” he said in a statement.

“The current district budget and future district budgets should prioritize smaller class sizes, more student support services, and competitive salaries for educators who are among the worst paid in LA County,” he added.

With regard to the demand for a supplemental stipend, UTLA
wrote on its website: “The District rejected our proposal for a $1,000 material and supply stipend on the same day that [Superintendent] John Deasy, who makes more than $1,000 a day, flew to South Korea for no clear reason.”

The union statement goes on to question who is footing the bill for the trip. District officials say Deasy’s trip is paid for by the the sponsoring organization and private funds.

LA Unified’s current salary offer to UTLA’s 35,000 members is a 6.64 bump in pay over three years, and a one-time 2 percent bonus, payable immediately.  Superintendent John Deasy has said even this conservative offer creates a projected deficit of $100 million as early as fiscal year 2015-16.

It is unclear if the district considered expected revenue increases from the state in its budget calculations.

State officials will begin releasing projected revenue numbers for next fiscal year in December.

“At that point we will get a better picture of the state’s fiscal heath and how much money we can expect for next year,” Lydia Ramos, the district’s communications director, told LA School Report.

In addition to the talk of raises, UTLA and the district also disagreed on plans to expand Restorative Justice programs. Last week, the union proposed forming a new committee of educators, parents, students, community, and administrators to research and monitor programs.

But the district, which contends that the recently revamped plan is working well,  countered that idea, suggesting it add five UTLA members to an existing oversight committee.

The next bargaining session is scheduled on Oct. 22.