Teachers at three charter schools in South Los Angeles along with thousands of other teachers walked through downtown streets Tuesday, demanding higher pay, smaller classes and more support staff, World News reported.
It's the first time ever that a charter school organization in California went on strike, according to the teachers union.
The strike began Monday after negotiators for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and The United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) failed to reach an agreement on Friday night.
Now, the head of the teachers union stated that Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti was working to bring negotiators back to the bargaining table for the first time since the talks collapsed.
However, an LAUSD spokeswoman announced that “nothing is scheduled at this time”.
LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner said on Tuesday that he wanted the union teachers to join him in pushing for more state funding.
The second-largest school district in the US was paralyzed as 30,000 Los Angeles, California teachers went on strike for the first time in 30 years, demanding a pay raise, as, according to reports, some 480,000 children were affected.
Thousands of teachers and union activists, wearing red, marched down the streets of LA in rainy weather on Monday, demanding from the district and the state to raise their pay by 6.5 percent immediately, to “fully staff” schools with librarians, nurses, counselors and other support personnel, and to reduce class sizes. The union also wants guarantees that public school funding won’t be affected by privatization.
UTLA say they number at over 30,000, but LA police estimated there were only 20,000 out in the streets on Monday.
“Here we are on a rainy day in the richest country in the world, in the richest state in the country, in a state that’s blue as it can be – and in a city rife with millionaires – where teachers have to go on strike to get the basics for our students,” Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of UTLA, said.
LAUSD is the second-largest in the US by the number of students, after New York City. In the 2017-18 school year, it had a budget of $7.52 billion and employed 26,046 teachers and 34,194 other employees, including 2,465 administrators. As of 2017, the LAUSD also had $5.1 billion more in liabilities than in assets, mostly due to the mounting health and pension benefits, according to one recent study.