LOS ANGELES _ Los Angeles teachers will continue to stay off the job Tuesday, even if a settlement is reached before the school day begins.
That means the first L.A. teachers' strike in 30 years will continue into a sixth school day.
L.A. Unified School District officials put the news out first, saying they learned of it directly from the union. United Teachers Los Angeles confirmed moments later, citing logistics.
"Our members have to vote on the tentative agreement before we go back to work," said union spokeswoman Anna Bakalis. "LAUSD knows this. Getting 33,000 people to vote in one day isn't logistically possible when we don't even have a tentative agreement."
The walkout began Jan. 14.
The district said in its statement that all of its schools would remain open Tuesday.
As a result, for one more day at least, skeleton crews made up of administrators, a small number of substitutes and nonteaching employees will watch over campuses. Fewer than a third of students came to school last week.
At City Hall, negotiators went back to work at 9:15 a.m. Monday after long bargaining sessions every day since Thursday.
Union leaders urged the rank and file to make a continued show of force by showing up in large numbers at the city's annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade.
Mayor Eric Garcetti, who is mediating the negotiations, canceled his appearance at the parade and at two other events related to the holiday. His revised schedule went out late Sunday.
When an agreement is reached _ whenever that is _ the Board of Education also would have to ratify the deal.
Union leaders then would face the choice of suspending the strike pending a vote by members, or voting immediately. The union is opting to take a vote first.
Accomplishing all that in time for classes to reopen by Tuesday would have been a tall order in the best of circumstances.
If the two sides fail to resolve the remaining sticking points Monday, teachers, their students and the city could face another week of the first L.A. teachers' strike in 30 years.
The union also has events lined up for Tuesday: a 6 a.m. march with firefighters, followed by a news conference and then a rally and march moving from City Hall to school district headquarters.
The wording of a tweet from the union describing Tuesday's strike events suggested a deal might not be quickly reached.
But a later tweet from Garcetti's office sounded hopeful that a resolution was near.
The two sides have been close on salary for some time, with the district offering 6 percent spread over the first two years of a three-year deal and the union wanting 6.5 percent all at once and retroactive to a year earlier.
Union President Alex Caputo-Pearl, however, has framed the negotiations as being about the future of traditional public education in Los Angeles and beyond. This thrust has translated into demands for smaller class sizes and schools "fully staffed" with nurses, librarians and counselors, who also are represented by his union.
Caputo-Pearl also has called for a moratorium on privately operated charter schools, most of which are non-union. Charters compete with the district for students and the state funding that follows them. L.A. Unified has more charters than any other district. About one in five Los Angeles public school students attends a charter school.
Charter school law, however, is made at the state level, so the union's agenda on charters cannot be realized at the bargaining table.
L.A. schools Superintendent Austin Beutner has insisted that many other demands also cannot be satisfied for financial reasons. He said he agreed with the union's requests to shrink class size and improve staffing, but he contends that the district can't afford to pay for the additional positions.
An improved state budget has provided some extra revenue to L.A. Unified, and some have expressed hope that the funds could help bridge the gap to a deal.
