Teacher Knows What Life Is Like for Striking Aides

First-grade teacher Janette Valenzuela watched with sympathy early Wednesday as teaching assistants staged a strike outside Langdon Avenue School for salary and benefits.

Two years ago, Valenzuela was experiencing their troubles firsthand. She had to work three jobs, including two years as a teacher’s assistant, to pay her way through Cal State Northridge before being hired as a teacher at the Sepulveda school.

“I wish I could have had paid holidays and health benefits when I was a TA because I was self-supporting,” Valenzuela said. “I was also working as a waitress at night and at a child-care resource center in the afternoon.”

The walkout at Langdon was just one of 119 staged Wednesday by 600 to 1,200 teaching assistants throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District. The “rolling strike” was called after talks stalled in negotiations over the teaching assistants’ first contract with the school district.

The union has asked for a minimum four hours of work a day to qualify the 10,000 teaching assistants it represents for health and other benefits. The district has so far turned down that proposal, offering instead health benefits for the 3,400 or so teaching assistants who now work at least four hours a day.

The two sides have reached general agreement on an 8% salary increase, which would bring the regular pay for the job to $10.20 an hour and close to $11 an hour for bilingual assistants. But teaching assistants say they will continue to strike at different schools until a final contract is negotiated.

Officials of the financially strapped district say they cannot afford to guarantee more hours for the TAs. In addition, district officials said they do not want the job to become so financially attractive that teaching assistants would give up the often difficult goal of becoming a state certified teacher.

Valenzuela, 29, who graduated from Alemany High School in Mission Hills, said that as a teaching assistant she performed many of the duties of classroom teachers and in some cases was the only teacher for students who did not speak English.

“I’ve worked with teachers who had almost nothing to do with their Spanish-speaking children and depend totally on the TAs to write and complete the lesson,” said Valenzuela, who grew up speaking both English and Spanish. “I wonder what those teachers are going to do without them?”

In addition to teaching, the assistants perform many duties that used to be done by teachers such as schoolyard supervision during recess and lunch periods.

“The TAs help with everything from sharpening pencils to filling glue bottles to cutting up paper for art projects,” Valenzuela said.