An historic strike in southeast LA County highlights pressures facing California schools

As multiple unions last week celebrated contract settlements that averted a massive, coordinated strike within the 520,000-student Los Angeles school system, teachers in a small district about 15 miles to the southeast quietly prepared to go it alone.

The 200 members of the Little Lake Education Association had reached a breaking point. Months of negotiations with the leadership of their school district had proved fruitless. Their suggestions for money-saving measures that would preserve jobs and critical health care benefits, they said, were dismissed.

So, on April 16, they walked out, commencing the first strike by teachers in the 154-year history of the district. It was a moment almost completely overshadowed by the events of the week in Los Angeles, where nearly 70,000 teachers, administrators and staff workers won major wage gains and other concessions by threatening to go on strike together.

In Little Lake, wages weren’t even on the table.

“We’re trying to protect our class sizes, get more support for our special education programs and keep health care affordable for our teachers and their families,” said Maria Pilios, president of the teachers’ union in the district, which serves portions of Santa Fe Springs, Downey and Norwalk. “Those are the priorities. That’s it.”

With roughly 3,500 students across seven elementary and two middle schools, the Little Lake City School District — where most students are Latino and many rely on free or reduced-price school meals — has far more in common with most districts in California than does the sprawling L.A. system.

While giant school systems such as those in Los Angeles, San Diego and Fresno can be bellwethers for policies and actions, they’re outliers in terms of size. The average school district in California has about 5,700 students, and enrollment has fallen by 7% statewide in the past decade.

Budgets in these districts have also been tightening — and in Little Lake, teachers are feeling the squeeze. Under proposals from the district, they faced the prospect of larger class sizes but no new resources — and 15 of them had already received layoff notices, with nearly that many more still possible.

The teachers who remained were looking at huge increases in their monthly health insurance costs. Though they weren’t bargaining on wages, the insurance costs were tantamount to a serious pay cut.

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When public school enrollment declines, so does funding from the state, because the money is apportioned through a formula that is directly tied to daily attendance. In the Little Lake district, enrollment has dropped by more than 500 students in the last five years.

The accompanying reduction in state funding has meant that districts needed to get creative with their budgets. Some, like Los Angeles, can tap deep financial reserves to keep teachers on the job and other resources flowing. In a system like Little Lake, no such money is available.

Instead, district leadership went after perhaps the most prized facet of the Little Lake teachers’ current contracts. For years, monthly health care premiums for the teachers and their families have been fully covered, a major attraction for a district that pays lower salaries than comparable school systems, union leaders say. In January, in the middle of an existing contract, Little Lake administrators dramatically reduced that coverage, and for some teachers it meant an immediate shift from a premium payment of zero per month to as much as $1,400.

“One-time funding resources have been exhausted. Reserves have been depleted,” Superintendent Jonathan Vasquez said in a video shared on the district’s website. “The district maintained benefits for employees for as long as it could.”

The district is also trying to claw back some money by increasing class sizes but not adding teachers. Pilios said that in addition to the 15 layoff notices already delivered, “We’d need to lay off another 13 to give them the [financial] numbers that they want. That’s almost 15% of the teachers in our district, and that’s just unacceptable.”

Pilios herself teaches middle school English. Three of her periods are already impacted — 33 students for one teacher, in classes normally set for a 26-to-1 ratio. The union’s request for additional adults in such classrooms for support, she said, has not been met.

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Versions of this dynamic are playing out in districts up and down California. On one side, management executives and negotiators stress their budget issues and look to hold down teacher costs or staff numbers. On the other, unions search for solutions that don’t involve putting their teachers in financial jeopardy.

“What we’re seeing [in Little Lake] is similar to the energy across the state,” said David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association, the umbrella organization for more than 300,000 teachers, including those in the Little Lake Education Association. “Educators are saying, ‘We’re not going to allow you to balance the budgets on our backs, or on the backs of our students.’” (Disclosure: The CTA is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

Pilios said the union brought suggestions to the district for saving money, including buying no new textbooks this year and taking a little out of each of several grants the district has already received. Negotiators for the district showed little interest in those ideas, she said.

The ensuing walkout hasn’t closed schools, with the district lining up strikebreaking instructors at $500 per day — a rate approved by the local Board of Education that generally exceeds the rate paid to its full-time teachers. The teachers’ union responded by filing paperwork in an attempt to recall all five members of the board.

Their demonstrations, meanwhile, have pulled in supporters in numbers that are many multiples of the small union, Pilios said, including community members, students and their families, as well as teachers from neighboring districts who’ve joined several of the gatherings.

The union and the district are closing in on an agreement for the teachers to pay some of their health care premiums, but a lower percentage than management instituted in January. An independent fact-finder concluded that the sides agree on Little Lake’s special education program, which is seeing notable growth in need and requires more staffing and support than it currently receives.

Still, nearly 95% of the educators in the district voted for the first-ever strike. This may not be a Los Angeles-sized action, but the frustration is real.

“My mother was an elementary school teacher,” CTA Vice President Leslie Littman said at a demonstration in Santa Fe Springs this week. “Once you anger elementary school teachers, you know you’re in the wrong.”

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