LA Teachers Union Poised To Agree To Live-Stream Lessons For Quarantined Students

The union for L.A. Unified School District teachers appears set to guarantee that all students who are quarantined because of COVID-19 will have access to live video simulcasts of their teachers' classroom instruction.

As talks with LAUSD continue over how quarantined students should be educated, United Teachers Los Angeles' latest proposal dropped an earlier demand that teachers be allowed to offer office hours instead of live video.

The apparent concession means that, for the first time since the pandemic began, a labor agreement between LAUSD and UTLA will require teachers to offer "simultaneous instruction" — streaming the same lesson live to students remotely that they're delivering to students in-person.

UTLA's latest proposal, dated Sept. 2, does not include an earlier demand that the district mandate vaccines for all eligible students, currently those ages 12 and older.

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UTLA also backed off its demand that a single coronavirus case would trigger the automatic quarantine of entire elementary classrooms, regardless of how many students or staff were exposed. Currently, only "close contacts" — students or staff who've spent more than 15 minutes within six feet of a positive case — must quarantine.

But the union has added a new demand: LAUSD recently revised its policy to allow staff and students who may have been exposed to skip quarantines if they’re vaccinated. That move aligned LAUSD with the L.A. County Department of Public Health's latest guidance to K-12 schools.

The union disagrees and is demanding all close contacts quarantine, regardless of their vaccination status.