LOS ANGELES _ What was going to be a fierce morning march on Los Angeles school district headquarters became a celebration instead Tuesday as thousands of striking teachers learned of a tentative agreement to end a six-day strike.
"You just taught the best lesson of your life," union President Alex Caputo-Pearl told a sea of supporters in union-red T-shirts gathered in Grand Park.
Caputo-Pearl had just emerged from a City Hall news conference in which his handshake with L.A. schools Superintendent Austin Beutner was warmer than many expected.
The union leader hailed the strike as a success and a national model, as did Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who mediated the talks that led to a deal. Even Beutner, who had tried to stop the strike, said the job action had put an important focus on public education, beginning a community conversation.
"Public education is now the topic in every household in our community," he said. "Let's capitalize on that. Let's fix it."
"We can't solve 40 years of underinvestment in public education in just one week or just one contract," he said.
The Board of Education is expected to move quickly to ratify the deal. Board members convened a morning closed session to review and discuss it. The deal also must be approved by United Teachers Los Angeles through a vote of its members.
Chapter chairs for individual schools were to be briefed in the early afternoon, and voting was expected to begin about 5 p.m. If members approve the deal, Wednesday will be a normal school day, with teachers, librarians, nurses and counselors at work across the nation's second-largest school system.
Union leaders have said they would not end the strike until their members ratify a contract.
Schools were open on Tuesday, as they were last week _ managed by skeleton staffs of administrators and employees who were not on strike. More than two-thirds of students did not show up during the first week of the strike.
The final key details of the tentative deal were worked out during an all-night bargaining session that ended at 6:15 a.m.
Less than an hour later, teachers rallied at a school complex within walking distance of district headquarters.
The agreement was announced at a 9:30 a.m. news conference at City Hall by Beutner, Caputo-Pearl and Garcetti, in the same wood-paneled conference room where much of the bargaining took place.
No one had slept. For the news conference, Caputo-Pearl put on a suit jacket. Beutner put on a tie.
"Today is a day full of good news," Garcetti said in announcing the agreement, which he said came after a "21-hour marathon that wrapped up just before sunrise."
"Everyone on every side has worked tirelessly to make this happen," the mayor said.
The tentative deal includes what amounts to a 6 percent raise for teachers _ with a 3 percent raise for the last school year and a 3 percent raise for this school year. (Teachers also lost about 3 percent of their salary by being on strike for six days, according to the school district.)
This 6 percent offer had been on the table before teachers went on strike, but the walkout was always about more than salary.
The agreement, which runs through June 2022, also includes a reduction of class sizes over four years to levels in the previous contract, but removes a contract provision that has allowed the school district to increase class sizes in times of economic hardship, Caputo-Pearl said in an interview. It was not immediately clear how that issue would be dealt with going forward.
But "we have started down a real path to address class size," Caputo-Pearl said.
That path will be extremely gradual. The agreement calls for a drop of one student per class next year, one more the next and two more the following year. That last-year drop of two students might be contingent on new tax revenue, a district source told the Los Angeles Times.
Schools targeted for special help will see their class sizes drop by an additional two students.
Under the agreement, the district agreed to create 30 community schools _ a model that has been tried in Cincinnati and Austin, Texas. These schools are supposed to provide social services to students and family, rich academic programs that include the arts and leadership roles for parents and teachers.
The district also agreed to expand to 28 the number of schools that will no longer conduct random searches of middle and high school students. That provision was especially important to students who marched in support of their teachers.
At the time of the news conference, the text of the agreement was not yet available, but all parties wanted to make their announcement in time for school to resume on Wednesday. The union has since posted the full text online.
From the beginning, Caputo-Pearl and the union framed the labor dispute as a fight over the future _ even the survival _ of traditional public education. Beutner framed the negotiations as a matter of what the nation's second-largest school system could afford to do within the limits of its resources.
Whether the union made progress in that battle is open to question, but its leaders will take to their members a deal that they say will improve working conditions for teachers and learning conditions for students.
In its last offer before the strike, the district proposed class size reductions that fell short of the dramatic changes the union wanted and said it would provide a nurse five days a week in elementary schools and a full-time librarian for all middle and high schools. The district also offered to add an academic counselor at high schools, although the student-to-counselor ratio would remain high.
The union criticized this proposal because the district did not commit to keeping these positions longer than one year.
Caputo-Pearl said there will be a follow-up agreement that will make the full-time nurses permanent. He declined to go into details, but his wording suggested that it could involve funding from outside the school district. L.A. County already has agreed to look for funds to pay for expanded nursing and mental health services for next year. County officials did not initially commit to paying for more than one year.
For next year at least, the district is supposed to hire 150 more full-time nurses.
Throughout negotiations, district officials said the union demands were far more than the school system could afford.
The union had put forward a lengthy proposal that touched on a wide range of issues important to its various members, including teachers at all grade levels, and those who teach early education, adult education, bilingual education and children with disabilities.
Though raises will help all members, some items on the union's original expansive list of demands dropped off the table even before the strike.
The union could have held out longer _ and some insiders originally envisioned a longer strike. But public support, which has been strong, might have eroded if the effort dragged on.
The union had planned to have members march to district headquarters after the rally across from City Hall, but canceled the march after the agreement was reached.
Union members at the rally were excited, even though most there didn't yet know details about the agreement.
Rosa Diaz, a special education teacher at Clinton Middle School, south of downtown, said she was pleasantly surprised to hear Caputo-Pearl say that those who teach students with disabilities would get two release days, when they would be paid to carry out duties outside of their normal routine.
"That was amazing," Diaz said.
The strike has made teachers realize "we're a lot stronger than we thought we were, so now we're not going to let things slide," said Nancy De La Torre, a first-grade teacher at Corona Avenue Elementary School in Bell.
She said she knew that the union was not going to get everything it asked for.
"At some point, you've got to compromise," she said.
