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San Diego teachers plan to strike next month for the first time in 30 years, after butting heads with the school district about special education staffing and services.
More than 300 teachers rallied outside the San Diego Unified School Board meeting Tuesday, in anticipation of a district-wide strike at 172 campuses scheduled for Feb. 26. Teachers held signs stating “respect our students, respect our contract,” and filed through the board room at the start of the meeting.
Union leaders said it was the last chance for the board to meet demands that include increased special education staffing, improved student support and teacher stipends.
San Diego Unified sets special education caseloads at 20 students to one teacher, below the state standard of 28 to one. Union officials said those ratios are a point of pride for teachers, but the district isn’t meeting its own standards, so many teachers have more special needs students than they can manage. That’s causing education shortfalls for “the most vulnerable students with disabilities,” San Diego Education Association President Kyle Weinberg said.
“Last school year, we ended the year with the majority of the schools in the district with vacancies for special education teachers and overages for caseloads for special education teachers,” Weinberg said. “And we're seeing similar numbers this school year that are growing, that are impacting schools throughout the district.”
San Diego Unified has announced that it will close schools on the day of the strike, and alerted parents to find other arrangements for their children. District officials said 97% of special education jobs are filled, and said they’re trying to reach an agreement with the union on other demands.
San Diego Unified is the second largest school district in California, with about 95,000 students, second only to Los Angeles Unified. The last San Diego teacher strike was in 1996, when teachers walked out of class for a week over pay and school decision-making. San Francisco teachers are also voting whether to authorize a strike for the first time in nearly half a century, also partially driven by special education concerns.
“Our educators are among the highest paid in the region, receive comprehensive benefits fully funded by the District, and work in classrooms with some of the lowest class size ratios in the region,” Superintendent Fabi Bagula said in a statement. “We have put concrete solutions on the table that remain under consideration, and we remain committed to bargaining in good faith and reaching an agreement that keeps students at the center.”
According to the district, San Diego teachers earn an average of $104,898 with average benefits totalling $20,620. That’s higher than some neighboring districts and the state average of $100,245 salary and $16,919 in benefits, the district stated.
The union stated that while compensation is part of its collective bargaining, members voted to strike over complaints about special education staffing, not pay. Weinberg said San Diego teachers have been fighting for special education changes for seven years, and have filed grievances against the district that aren’t resolved.
Special education teachers at the rally described work conditions that they said lead to teacher burnout and put student’s learning and even safety at risk.
Kimberly Carpender, a special education teacher at Bell Middle School, said some of her students are shortchanged on academic support that’s promised in their individualized education programs, the legally binding documents that spell out services. For instance, she said students who are below grade level in reading may get support in that subject, but are on their own for history and science classes.
“They're supposed to be getting 16 hours of service a week, and they're only getting eight because there are not people to provide the other eight hours of service,” she said. “And it's not one child. It's multiple kids. And the result is those kids go home with failing grades because they're not getting help.”
San Diego Unified lets individual schools determine how to schedule specialized academic instruction hours, and encourages them to group students by grade level and need to maximize the amount of support they get, district spokesperson James Canning said.
Mike Hernandez, also a teacher at Bell, said his classes include students with widely varied cognitive abilities and some with aggressive behavior. That makes it difficult to teach lessons that work for all of them, and also requires him to divert his attention when a student acts out.
“I can either be his one-on-one and take him out when he blows up and flips tables, or I can support fourteen kids in 50 minutes teaching math,” Hernandez said. “Nope. I can't really do both.”
Weinberg said those challenges leave teachers struggling to manage classes and students falling behind in learning.
“Those gaps grow larger and larger and often become insurmountable,” he said.
The union is demanding that the district boost special education staffing, settle existing grievances over excessive caseloads, schedule case management days that allow teachers to do planning and student assessments, provide $4,000 stipends to special education teachers and pay the cost for general education teachers to earn special education credentials. Canning said the district is not publicly releasing its counterproposals.
The district will offer makeup classes on March 9 to compensate for lost instructional time during the strike.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
