LOS ANGELES _ As the first Los Angeles teachers' strike in 30 years stretched into its second day Tuesday, the school district's top official lamented that the walkout already had cost millions in state funding.
Teachers, meanwhile, returned to the picket line and then converged downtown for a rally to protest the growth of charter schools, which their union, United Teachers Los Angeles, has blamed for draining funds from the district.
Los Angeles schools Superintendent Austin Beutner, in a morning news conference, said the first day hit hard with only a third of the district's students showing up for school. That cost the school system about $25 million in state funding tied to enrollment, he said. Subtract unpaid wages for the strikers of $10 million, he said, and that amounts to an estimated one-day net loss of $15 million.
The union, which wants better wages, smaller class sizes and more support staff at schools, has argued that the Los Angeles Unified School District has the money on hand to meet its demands, even while saying that the school system also needs to get more state funding.
Beutner said the union and its 31,000 members who walked off the job should join with the district in pushing Sacramento to better fund schools.
"Let's build on the renewed attention on public education in our community," he said. "Let's bottle it. Let's put it on our buses and let's go to Sacramento."
Negotiations between United Teachers Los Angeles and the nation's second-largest school district broke off late Friday after more than 20 months of bargaining, with no resolution to the educators' demands. District officials have said they don't have the money to cover everything teachers are asking for, while union leaders have accused the district of "hoarding" funds.
Alex Caputo-Pearl, the president of UTLA, said Tuesday that members are "prepared to go as long as it takes" to get a fair contract. He joined picketers at the Accelerated Schools in South Los Angeles, a small charter school network whose educators stopped working Tuesday in their own strike for improved working conditions. The action is the first strike by charter teachers in California and only the second in the nation, according to UTLA.
"This has been already an historic week for educators and for public education in Los Angeles," Caputo-Pearl said.
Teachers at Accelerated have their own contract with the charter operator, but Caputo-Pearl said the two strikes have a few common themes.
"Accelerated Management has money to take care of the issues on the table," he said. "Also in common is that Accelerated Management is being driven by ideology, looking at teachers as disposable and not as indispensable. We've got to change that."
By midmorning, the area around the intersection of First and San Pedro streets in downtown Los Angeles was filled with teachers and supporters, chanting and waving signs outside the offices of the California Charter Schools Association.
Charters are privately managed and, while most are nonunion, UTLA represents about 1,000 charter school teachers. Caputo-Pearl has said existing charters that are struggling with enrollment also are being hurt by the "grow at any cost" strategy of some charter advocates.
Fiona Engler, the magnet coordinator for Paseo Del Rey Elementary, a magnet school in Playa del Rey, has been with LAUSD since 1985 and said she's seen the damage that charter schools have wreaked on the public school system. Charters, she said, "cherry pick" students and send those with discipline problems back to public schools.
She said she also is striking for less "hardcore testing," of kids in the younger grades.
"Imagine just taking a test that just goes on for pages and pages and pages on an iPad," she said, describing current testing requirements. "And just goes on for hours."
Jackson Downey, 15, a sophomore at Cleveland High School Humanities Magnet in Reseda, rode the Metro downtown from the San Fernando Valley with four friends to support teachers at the rally. Downey _ holding a sign that read, "Without teechars are sines wil luk like dis"_ said he thinks charter schools are detrimental to the public school system.
"I see it as the end of public schools," he said.
This week's walkout has proved to be a massive disruption for hundreds of thousands of students and their families. With schools still open, skeletal staffs have crammed students together to try supervising them in larger groups and struggled to keep them engaged as teachers march outside. The vast majority of the district's parents and guardians are low-income, and many have grappled with choosing between missing work to watch their children or sending them into an unknown situation at school.
About 140,000 students attended Los Angeles schools on Monday, down from about 450,000 on a typical rainy day. Beutner pointed to two schools _ Virgil Middle and Telfair Elementary _ where attendance was slightly higher, as an example of students relying on the district for shelter and a warm meal.
At Telfair, he said, about 20 percent of the students are homeless. At Virgil, 100 percent of families are living in poverty. On Monday, 60 percent of Virgil Middle School's students attended class along with about 40 percent at Telfair.
"They came for shelter from the rain. They came for a warm meal and a secure, welcoming environment. And of course they came to learn," Beutner said.
All schools will remain open during the strike, but it was not clear how many students attended classes Tuesday.
The second day of the strike started chilly but much drier than the first for teachers who formed picket lines outside schools as the sun rose Tuesday. Burroughs Middle School drama teacher Jennifer Heath was ready for the looming storm. She went to the army surplus store on Monday night, after a day picketing in the rain, and bought more waterproof gear.
Outside the Hancock Park campus with more than two dozen teachers, Heath's golden retriever Fenton wore a red poncho as he lay on the sidewalk next to a maltipoo named Bailey, sporting a bandanna that said "strike therapist in training."
Heath fought back tears as she talked about how unnatural it was not to be able to work with her students and watch over them during the day.
"We need to invest in public education," she said, holding up a sign with "FUND THE FUTURE" in red block letters.
Christina Silva, a special-education teacher, said she's worried about her students, many of whom have individualized education plans that require one-on-one attention from teachers or aides assigned to them.
"How do we close the achievement gap when we're out here?" Silva said. But in the long term, getting smaller classes for her students will help them emotionally and in their academics, she said.
