LOS ANGELES _ The union representing Los Angeles teachers announced that it will strike on Jan. 10 and that it has no plans to return to the negotiating table.
"We are not going back into a bargaining process that has failed and that the district has not taken seriously for 20 months," said Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, at the union's headquarters in the Koreatown neighborhood.
Although that hard line could be cast as brinkmanship, an agreement with the Los Angeles Unified School District seems increasingly unlikely as each side dismisses the other's position as untenable.
"The district knows where we are," Caputo-Pearl added.
United Teachers Los Angeles represents about 31,000 teachers, counselors, librarians and nurses. About half a million students would be affected by a strike.
The dispute between the teachers union and the district has reached a point of peril that has not existed since the early 1990s _ when a strike was narrowly averted _ and 1989, when one was not.
In those earlier conflicts, the fundamental issues were salaries and benefits. Here, the divisions are broader.
School district leaders assert the district's long-term solvency is at risk _ and will continue to be even if a reasonable agreement is reached. Union leaders reject the idea of a budget crisis and say the existential danger is from L.A. schools Superintendent Austin Beutner and his allies, who they say want to destroy traditional public education.
According to this narrative, Beutner, a wealthy businessman with no prior work experience in a school system, wants to increase the number of privately operated, nonunion charter schools and weaken the union's influence. That agenda would harm the long-term interests of most students as well as district employees, union leaders say. The union views everything through this lens, including the superintendent's still-confidential plan to reorganize the district.
Few details of that plan have been publicly disclosed, but the Los Angeles Times has reported that the district would be divided into 32 networks.
"Beutner is intentionally starving our schools by hoarding the reserves so that cuts can be justified," the union said in a statement Tuesday, "opening the pathway for his ultimate goal: to break up the school district into 32 networks, making our neediest schools more vulnerable to takeover attempts by corporate interests."
That conviction has helped push union leaders toward a walkout and could make it challenging to end a strike quickly.
Beutner rejects the union narrative and has said he is willing to negotiate around the clock to avoid a strike. He says the goal of his reorganization plan is to improve services to students and families by bringing more resources closer to schools.
Like the union, he says he is on the side of the people.
"A strike will be awful," Beutner said Tuesday. "This is not going down on a Saturday or Sunday. This is of consequence. Think of the homeless student who is not going to get a meal. We serve a million meals a day."
Meals would be available for students at their schools during a strike. But if they chose not to cross picket lines, they would miss them.
Beutner has stated that many of the items on the union's lengthy list of demands are reasonable, but also that the district cannot afford most of them at this time.
The union's announcement came one day after district officials released a report by a fact-finding panel. The goal of the panel was to establish a base of information that both sides could agree on and propel them toward compromise and a settlement.
Ultimately, each side cherry-picked parts of the report to emphasize. For L.A. Unified, the big win was the panel's unanimous endorsement of the district's salary offer. The school system is offering a 3 percent raise retroactive to July 1, 2017, and another 3 percent taking effect on July 1, 2018. The union wants a 6.5 percent raise, retroactive to July 1, 2016.
Caputo-Pearl said it would be misleading to focus on the failed negotiation as an argument over wages.
"Austin Beutner continues to try to buy us off by focusing almost exclusively on salary," he said Wednesday of the district's salary offer. "We will not be bought off."
The union pointed to the panel's support for class-size reduction and schools fully staffed with nurses, counselors and librarians. The report did not state the cost of this new hiring or how it would be paid for, citing the conflicting estimates of the union and district.
The fact-finding process was the last step required under California law before the union could call a strike.
"This is the proverbial line in the sand," said University of California, Los Angeles education professor Tyrone Howard. "It's significant because it tells members to prepare to strike, but it also lets the district know: 'Let's get a deal now or we're striking.' I think it elevates the stakes when a date is announced."
For its part, the district now has the legal authority to impose a contract. Beutner said Tuesday that school officials had not decided whether they would take this step.
