By Gabriel Arizon
San Fernando Valley Sun/el Sol
After voting overwhelmingly to accept a new contract offer and end an eight-day strike, teachers at El Camino Real Charter High School (ECR) returned to work on Tuesday, Feb. 18, by staging a morning “walk-in” before classes began.
The teachers – who walked off the job Feb. 10 after working without a contract since July – voted by a 97.5% margin Monday in favor of the new deal, officials with United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) said.
The two sides met for multiple bargaining sessions over the long Presidents Day weekend, culminating in an offer from the school’s Board of Directors Sunday. Two earlier mediation sessions failed to produce a deal.
“After a long week, we successfully reached an agreement where school management has committed to fairer wages and other wins that benefit our school community,” said Kate Rechner, a special education English teacher on the union’s bargaining team.
“We’re looking forward to getting back into the classroom with our incredible students. We, alongside parents and students, are more united than ever and we will continue to fight for the school we envision ECR can be.”
UTLA said the agreement includes a salary increase of 19% over three years, among other terms. The Board of Directors will formally vote to approve the contract at its next meeting, scheduled for Feb. 27.
The Board of Directors had offered the teachers a 15% raise, while the union reportedly was pushing for a 21% bump.
“No other school in the United States has offered a 15% raise, which by the way is 5.5% more than the second-largest school district here in the United States, which is the Los Angeles Unified School District,” Brad Wright, chair of the school’s Board of Directors, said earlier in the negotiations.
“The problem we have is that they would like to have 21%, and if we did that – which I would love to be able to give it to them, the board would love to be able to give this to them – if we did that, we’re an independent charter, which means that we would go in the red and we would be revoked, which means the charter would then fall back to the hands of the Los Angeles Unified School District.”
It was revealed at a Board of Directors meeting in December that school administrators received a 15% salary increase retroactive to July 1, 2024. That was followed by a vote of 5-1 in January to cut 44 credentialed positions, including five counselors, five English teachers, one school psychologist and nine special education teachers, according to the union.
The cuts were made because of declining enrollment, according to the Board of Directors. Enrollment dropped to 2,937 students in 2024-25, down from 3,171 in the 2023-24 school year.
The Impact of the Strike
Because of the strike, some classes had no teachers or substitutes. Some students who attended school last week were marked present for the day and some spent the day in the school’s auditorium.
Miles Basurto, a parent of a freshman at the school, spoke with the San Fernando Valley Sun/el Sol before the strike’s conclusion. While taking neither the teachers nor the school’s side in the matter, he felt the educators “tried to weaponize my daughter’s education.”
Basurto said that the issue wasn’t just that there weren’t enough teachers, but there was a lack of students because parents who sided with the teachers weren’t sending their children to school. His daughter was still attending class during the strike and told him that she would be in a classroom with only seven other students.
“I have a feeling that a lot of kids told their parents there was no point to them going [to school] because that’s what my daughter was telling me,” Basurto said. “She literally sent me a video of a student teaching another student how to dance [in class]. It’s just unfortunate that the teachers had to use the students as pawns.”
Adding to Basurto’s frustration is that an independent fact-finding report was released in early February that, after examining the issues of the dispute, sided with the school – yet teachers decided to strike anyway. After reading the report himself and doing his own research, he said that the teachers should have accepted the report and never gone on strike.
If the school had bent to the teachers’ demand for a 21% pay increase and ECR ran into a deficit and lost its charter as a result, he said it would’ve been a much bigger deal than the school losing some teachers.
“The teachers are talking about securing their future. What they did for me, as a parent, is that they only put my child’s future up in the air,” Basurto said, “because … they’ve literally missed a week of education. As a parent, I feel bad my child had to live through this.”
CNS contributed to this article.
