As of January 15, 2019, the Los Angeles Unified School District is experiencing a teacher strike that ranges from about 30,000 to 35,000 teachers in a school district of 600,000 students—the second-largest district in the nation. The teacher strike, currently backed by the Los Angeles Unified School union, have the following demands:
An immediate 6.5% raise instead of 6% distributed between 2 years.
A decrease in class size, as a good portion of teachers from K-12 grade levels experience class sizes exceeding 40 students
Provide more:
nurses on campus
social workers to help marginalized students
librarians to properly organize and assign textbooks.
Hire counselors and psychologists on every campus to secure college/career readiness and safeguard the mental health of students.
The 1.8 billion dollars being withheld in reserves to be used to improve the schools*
*The 1.8 billion dollars are claimed by the district to already have been allocated
As a response to the strike, the school district is hiring more than 900 non-union substitute teachers and administration, and are still requiring students to attend school. Historically, this is the first major teacher strike in Los Angeles in 30 years, with the previous strike of 1989 lasting about 6 weeks. At this point, it is unclear if the district and the union will reach a resolution in the near future.
