District, Union Settle Contract Dispute

The Los Angeles Unified School District and its teachers union announced a settlement Tuesday in their long-running contract dispute, giving teachers a 2% raise this year and more say in hiring and assignment decisions.

The raises, retroactive to July, will cost the district about $80 million. The district will also pay $55 million to cover the increased cost of health benefits for teachers and retirees in 2005.

At a news conference Tuesday, Supt. Roy Romer said the increased salaries would be funded by adjusting and cutting the district’s $6.8-billion budget, including selling some property and covering some facilities and maintenance costs with money from L.A. Unified’s construction bonds.

“It’s a tight squeeze, but we can do it,” he said. “We feel it is fair and appropriate for teachers ... to receive this raise.”

At a news conference an hour later at the headquarters of United Teachers Los Angeles, union President John Perez called the contract settlement “good news for teachers, good news for LAUSD and good news for students.”

He praised what he considers concessions made by the district that include retaining teachers’ seniority when schools are reorganized and protecting their rights in selecting deans for those campuses.

The district also agreed to reduce the number of mandatory, after-school faculty meetings and to include union members in discussions about how teachers are trained and evaluated. In addition, the district will include teachers when it develops a new code of student conduct.

The changes, Perez said, “will raise UTLA members to the level of full educational partners in the education of our students.”

The contract must still be ratified by the Board of Education and UTLA members. Romer said he expected the board to approve the contract tentatively as early as next week. Perez said he thought the union’s 46,000 members would endorse the contract in mid-April.

If ratified, the contract would remain in effect through June 30, 2006. Beginning teacher salaries would increase from $41,177 to $42,000, and standard pay for veteran teachers would grow from $72,247 to $73,691.

“We would have liked to do more,” Romer said, “but we’ve just got to make it match. We’re pushing every limit we can to find the revenue to cover this 2%.”

As they offered universal praise for the agreement, officials gave varying explanations for why negotiations had dragged on nearly 20 months.

Romer said that the district had been waiting to get details of the 2005-06 state budget from the governor’s office Jan. 15, and that since that information was received, “we have been in continuing negotiations.”

Perez, however, said district officials “weren’t serious about wanting to come to an agreement with us.”

And board President Jose Huizar blamed election campaigns for stealing the focus of UTLA leaders and school board members.The settlement, he said, “could have been here four months ago. But it’s always could’ve, should’ve.”

Teachers ousted several longtime union leaders, including Perez, this month in an election that many said was a response to the protracted contract talks. Three board members -- Huizar, Julie Korenstein and Marlene Canter -- were unopposed in their March 8 reelections.

Several sources said negotiations intensified after Huizar, Canter and another board member, Jon Lauritzen, began sitting in on the talks in the last few weeks.

Even as he promised that teachers would ratify the new contract, Perez said he expected the union’s work-to-rule job action, which rolled through the district Monday, to continue. The tactic involves teachers refusing to do any work outside their contractual duties.