The SFUSD Teachers Strike Goes On. Here’s What It’ll Take to End It

San Francisco’s public schools are closed for the second day in a row on Tuesday, as a path to end the city’s teachers strike remains elusive.

The district announced around 5 p.m. that schools would be shuttered again Wednesday.

The union says it won’t back down without contract proposals that meet its core demands on wages and health care, while the district argues it cannot spend beyond a tight budget. So far, the union seems to be enjoying a groundswell of support from district families and city residents.

Meanwhile, elected officials are increasingly pleading with both sides to come to an agreement and reopen schools. Members of the Board of Education joined negotiations at the War Memorial Veterans Building in downtown San Francisco throughout the day, and Mayor Daniel Lurie arrived around 5 p.m.

Earlier in the day, union leaders said that while the district is stepping up its offers at the bargaining table, it’s not enough. So far in negotiations on Tuesday morning, the district moved its offer on health care from covering 75% of premiums to 80%.

“Not enough. We walk the line until it’s 100%,” Nathalie Hrizi, United Educators of San Francisco’s vice president of substitutes, said to loud cheers from the crowd of thousands gathered at a rainy rally at Dolores Park. “We walk the line until special education has a workload model. We walk the line until paraeducators and certificated staff get the raise we deserve to stay in our city.”

She said that the district was “still not ready” to meet the union’s outstanding demands.

Tuesday’s negotiations came after bargaining teams met late into the night Monday for what Balboa High School math teacher Ryan Alias called the most productive bargaining session since October.

“We’ve seen movement today that we haven’t seen in 11 months of bargaining,” he told KQED Monday, after the hourslong session wrapped up around 9 p.m.

For once, district officials echoed the union’s assessment of bargaining.

“We made a lot of progress last night working with our partners, and we started early this morning to continue to hammer out some of these last remaining issues,” Superintendent Maria Su told reporters Tuesday. “I continue to believe that we can come together in good faith and reach an agreement that is fair, responsible and sustainable.”

The parties have been negotiating a new contract since last March, and educators have been working under an expired deal since July.

For months, negotiations yielded little movement from either side. UESF had proposed 9% raises for classroom teachers and 14% raises for paraeducators; fully funded health care for educators’ families; changes to the district’s special education staffing model; and a few no-cost proposals related to immigration and housing protections for families.

The San Francisco Unified School District has maintained that those demands aren’t feasible given its budget crisis — with a $100 million deficit projected for next year. Until this past weekend, the district had only offered a 2% raise for each of the next three years, with concessions from educators, including giving up a sabbatical program and additional preparation periods for those who teach Advanced Placement courses.

But as the strike loomed over the weekend, the school district accepted some of the union’s no-cost proposals, and on day one of the work stoppage, it offered its most significant raise for some staff: a 10% raise over two years for paraeducators and school security guards, and an additional hour of work per day for paraeducators.

“It was significantly higher than the district said was possible,” Alias said.

According to San Francisco State University labor historian John Logan, that movement — and the thousands of people who turned out to picket lines and a rally outside City Hall — sends a message: So far, the city has teachers’ backs, and they have the leverage.

“That was really unusually large, and the atmosphere was sort of unusually steadfast and resolved and determined,” Logan said. “For the time being, [educators] have very significant support in the community and amongst parents. So I think the pressure [is] on the school district to come up with an offer — not just an improved offer — but an offer that is acceptable to the teachers union.”

Alias said the union’s bargaining team has been invigorated by the community support, and while the district’s proposal on some wage hikes was a win, it will take more for the union to accept a deal.

To end the strike, he said, “We need higher wages. We need fully funded family health care. And we need the district to take the stability crisis in our special education staffing seriously.”

Alias said the union wouldn’t decide whether to accept the proposed raise for classified staff until it sees the district’s wage proposals for other educators, as well as those addressing special education workloads and health benefits.

“It’s really difficult to see how this will be settled unless the school district comes up with a significantly better offer,” said Logan, the SFSU labor historian. “Something that teachers think, ‘Yes, this isn’t everything we want, but this is enough, and we’ve achieved enough of our goals and … we have sufficiently achieved our aims at this point.”

“I do think that will happen, but absent that, I don’t think there’s any settlement in the near future,” Logan said.

Despite recent progress, Alias said UESF leaders are frustrated that the district still hasn’t made an offer to fully cover health care, which costs a family of four up to $1,550 a month after rates increased this year.

The union made that demand months ago, but he said on Monday night, UESF was told that SFUSD would meet with the city’s Health Service System on Tuesday to get cost estimates for the proposal.

“They hadn’t done their homework,” Alias told KQED.

As an alternative to SFUSD’s offer to cover a percentage of premiums, it’s also proposed an annual benefit allowance of $24,000 for educators to spend on health care costs.

As the sides continue to negotiate, city departments have stepped in to offer some extended programming for about 1,000 of the district’s most vulnerable students, and served more than 3,000 meals at temporary distribution centers on Monday. Parents are also piecing together alternative child care, keeping kids busy with educational activities and trying to get through math and grammar worksheets in instructional packets sent out by the district.

Those challenges could grow as the strike goes on, and while community support for the union appears strong at the moment, Ohio State University political science professor Vladimir Kogan warned that during the COVID-19 pandemic, San Francisco was a sort of “cautionary tale” of when that support wanes.

The city “had a recall just a few years ago, in part because much of the community really turned on the school board in some of the things that they were doing at the behest of the teachers union,” he said.

In 2022, three school board members were recalled, in part over their reticence to reopen campuses during the 2020-2021 school year, while pushing forward a racial justice effort to rename certain district schools and end merit-based enrollment at Lowell High School.

“The memory of the recall is probably still pretty fresh and it shows you just how quickly opinion can turn,” Kogan said. “Particularly, when the public comes to believe that the interest of the teachers are not the same as the interest of the students.”

Su said Tuesday morning that the district recognizes the urgency to reach a full agreement and end the strike.

“We understand the strain and the difficulties that school closure is placing on parents, on students and on the community,” she said.

Because the state reimburses school districts based on daily attendance, every day that campuses are closed also costs the district $7 million to $10 million, according to Su.

KQED’s Ayah Ali-Ahmad contributed to this report.