San Francisco Teachers Take Key Step Toward Strike

San Francisco’s teachers union plans to take a significant step toward a strike next week, after eight months of bargaining with the San Francisco Unified School District have failed to yield a contract agreement.

United Educators of San Francisco will hold a strike authorization vote — the first of two the union’s rules require to officially call a work stoppage — on Dec. 3.

Union president Cassondra Curiel said that since UESF and SFUSD declared an impasse and entered third-party mediation in October, the district has not made concessions on proposed raises and expanded health care coverage, among other issues, prompting the union to take a step toward striking.

“We did not get a signal from the district that they were going to change routes at all,” she said. The union and district’s bargaining teams attended a full day of mediation earlier this month, which Curiel said yielded no progress. “That really made it clear to our bargaining team that the district has every intention to maintain a status quo in our contract,” she continued.

SFUSD said in a statement on Wednesday that it was continuing to bargain in good faith “to achieve a fair agreement that avoids disruption to student services.”

UESF and SFUSD began bargaining over a new two-year contract for educators in March. Their current contract expired in June, but mostly remains in place until a new deal is reached.

In October, UESF rejected SFUSD’s contract offer, which would have given educators a 2% raise, saying it would have required more concessions than gains from its members.

The deal would have undone existing agreements that give high school teachers who take on extra work — as department heads or teachers of Advanced Placement courses that enroll a certain number of students — an additional “prep” period, and cut stipends awarded to schools based on the number of AP exams their students take.

It would also have ended a program that allows educators to apply for semester-to-year-long sabbaticals after serving in the district for a minimum number of years and increased class sizes on some campuses.

UESF’s initial proposal for the pay increase in March was 14% for classified employees and 9% for certificated employees over two years. In the months since, there’s been no back-and-forth negotiations bringing that percentage down, Curiel told KQED in October. She said the 2% offer was the first from SFUSD that included a raise.

The wage hike is important, especially for paraeducator positions, which are some of the district’s lowest-paid and hardest-to-staff roles, according to the union.

But the district has indicated that its budget to increase compensation is tight.

SFUSD is currently in the second of a two-year budgeting process to curb a massive ongoing deficit. Last year, it slashed $114 million in annual expenses through hundreds of early retirement buyouts, the implementation of a strict staffing model in schools and administrative position reductions. This year, it will need to make another $48 million in cuts, which Superintendent Maria Su has indicated could be even more challenging.

In October, the district said it was committed to a budget process that benefits students while ensuring long-term financial stability.

“Right now, the state of California holds the authority to override any decision by the San Francisco Board of Education if it believes that decision could compromise the district’s financial stability,” the district said in a statement.

In October, SFUSD said that “any proposal for raises must be approved by the CDE and must be financially sustainable.”

The request for a wage hike comes just two years after SFUSD gave historic $9,000 raises to educators, along with a 5% salary increase the following year. Under that deal, classified educators also received a significant bump to a minimum wage of $30 an hour.

Curiel said that higher pay matters to members, but the two primary focuses of negotiations have not been about compensation. UESF is requesting an agreement that the district will cover health care for educators’ dependents and development of a workload model aimed at improving working conditions for special education teachers.

“We are 36 days away from a massive increase to our health care for the second or third year in a row for our dependents,” Curiel said Tuesday. She said that educators pay about $650 per pay cycle for coverage for one child. In January, coverage for two will be more than $1500, she said.

While any health care or workload model deal would likely incur costs, the union’s final two major demands are “low-to-no-cost.” They’re asking to add language to the educators contract that echoes the district’s sanctuary status and commits to using district resources to provide shelter for the most vulnerable students.

The district already has that language and employs it in school policy, but Curiel said members feel it’s necessary to add it to their contracts because it makes it much more difficult to reverse.

“We see what happened to our nation during the last election cycle … when folks changed an administration that then changed policy entirely,” Curiel said. “If it’s in our contract, they absolutely cannot do that without the entire union agreeing to it.

“The 6,000 members of UESF hold these values very deeply and want to maintain them. The district insists it doesn’t want to put it in the contract, and we know they can and they absolutely should,” she continued.

The district did not respond to a request for comment regarding the language demands.

UESF has requested to be released from mediation. If that request is granted, the district and union would enter a final third-party-led “fact-finding” period to try to reach an agreement.

The strike authorization vote will happen in parallel. If it passes, it gives the union’s bargaining team permission to call a vote to officially authorize a strike in the future.