As the Long Beach Unified School District and its teachers union brace to restart contract negotiations, a survey administered by the union reveals that compensation and class size are the top concerns of teachers who overwhelmingly rejected a tentative agreement last June.
More than half of survey respondents said they would still vote no on the tentative agreement due to specific issues. Another 17% of respondents had been confused by the tentative agreement and were split on whether they would now vote yes or no. The remaining 29% of respondents said none of those options reflected their position on the tentative agreement. Less than a quarter of Teachers Association of Long Beach’s 3,369 electors responded to the survey.
TALB president Gerry Morrison said the survey showed teachers rejected the agreement for many reasons — from school safety to workload and adjunct hours to leave policies to pay. But the TALB survey and interviews conducted by the Long Beach Post show educators prioritize big-budget items, at a time when the district is operating at a significant deficit and pressure to reach a contract is mounting.
“The big issues that teachers talk about,” Morrison said — namely pay raises and class size reductions — “all of them are expensive items.” They’re also the issues many teachers say would most meaningfully improve their lives and ability to deliver quality education.
TALB has reliably won pay raises for teachers since the 2008 financial crisis, but the recently rejected tentative agreement contained no pay increase and represented the first such rejection in TALB history.
The district is “telling us they have no money, and they’re talking about laying off teachers,” Morrison said, explaining that the union bargaining team is up against a wall as it prepares to restart negotiations with the district on Thursday.
Earlier this month, Superintendent Jill Baker released a video explaining the district’s growing deficit, which is projected to reach $100 million this school year.
“In the face of continued declining enrollment, student attendance that has not rebounded from pandemic lows, and the expiration of federal relief funding, our revenues no longer keep pace with our costs,” Baker said.
In the last 20 years, the district’s enrollment has dropped by a third — a loss larger than the size of many entire school districts in the state, Baker said. This translates to a dramatic drop in funding as California schools receive state dollars based on student enrollment.
Nor has attendance rebounded since the COVID-19 pandemic. Each percentage drop in attendance costs the district $1 million in lost funding, Baker said in the video.
Yet other districts are facing similar challenges, and some have managed to ratify contracts that appease teachers.
United Teachers Los Angeles, the union representing educators of Los Angeles Unified, won significant salary increases, reduced workload and class size reductions in its 2022-2025 contract.
“Every win in this agreement is because of the power we demonstrated in the streets,” UTLA wrote on its website, referring to a 2019 strike of 30,000 Los Angeles teachers.
That strike gave UTLA enormous leverage and sent a clear message to LAUSD, Morrison said. “We’re not at that point yet, I don’t think,” he added.
Yet the urgency to reach a new tentative agreement is intensifying. Teachers are still covered by the contract that expired in June, Morrison explained, but unless a new tentative agreement with health plan adjustments is reached by the end of the year, teachers will have to start paying monthly health care premiums.