Less than two months after the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) forced a concessionary contract on 35,000 educators and three months after a similarly rotten deal was reached with 30,000 school support staff represented by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is pressing ahead with even more cuts. Significantly, the initiatives arrive at the end of the school year, when educators and staff are not able to lauLAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho recently announced the ending of the district’s highly successful Primary Promise program, along with a raft of new cost-cutting measures. Primary Promise was an early intervention program designed to assist elementary school students struggling with reading and mathematics proficiency. The program will be replaced with the Literacy and Numeracy Intervention Model, which, while expanding access to middle school students, will remove dedicated teachers. Instead, the new program will further add to regular teachers’ workloads.
The conversion will save the district an estimated $100 million per year. The resultant loss of personnel, however, will only be a fraction of the 2,100 full-time positions funded by federal pandemic relief funds through September 2024. Even if additional layoffs do not materialize as a result of the cutoff of those funds, there will be massive cuts to teacher and support staff compensation and benefits. The new Literacy and Numeracy Intervention Model will be entirely dependent on discretionary funding from individual school sites.
Asked if he thought there was any chance of reversing the cuts after the 2024 deadline, Carvalho responded, “Pulling the rabbit out of the hat will not work. The rabbit is dead, and the hat is small.”
The plan to end Primary Promise comes despite significant academic gains among students who participated. More than 1,700 parents wrote a letter to the superintendent’s office in support of the plan. The letter read, “The LAUSD has plenty of programs that don’t work, so we, a coalition of parents, teachers, staff and community members, are asking the board to stop Superintendent Carvalho from unilaterally dismantling this program that does in fact work in order to enact a lesser version.”
A deal was also reached on June 2 to add three additional instructional days to the school calendar. Teachers and school staff will not be paid for the additional three days, although two of the three will replace two mandatory days of professional development training, meaning that teachers will now have one additional working day without pay.
The district had previously attempted to alter the school calendar in March, shortening the winter break period from three weeks to two-and-a-half weeks, followed by an additional decrease to two weeks in subsequent years. In response, the UTLA filed an unfair labor practice charge against the district for imposing a new calendar without any discussion with the union. The unfair labor practice was recently dropped after the latest calendar year alteration was announced.
The district had also attempted to add four so-called acceleration days to the school year calendar, intended to make up for alleged learning loss while students were being instructed remotely during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This had led to the UTLA advising members to voluntarily boycott the acceleration days, as they too had been imposed without the union’s consent.
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