Update, April 4, 8:50 p.m.
Sacramento City Unified students will be back in class Monday after the district and the teacher and staff unions reached an agreement to end the strike that started on March 23.
Click here for more coverage on the end of the strike. We will leave this page and the information below as a record of the issues that lead to the strike and status before the strike was resolved.
Update, April 1, 6 p.m.
As the weekend looms, there’s no sign teachers and staff plan to end their strike of the Sacramento City Unified School District. The strike is now in its eighth day.
At district headquarters, some parents have been staging a sit-in outside the superintendent’s office for over 40 hours. They say they hope it motivates the two striking unions and the district to come to an agreement soon.
Six of the eight Sac City Unified board of education members signed a letter to the teachers’ union leadership on Thursday, asking them to end the strike while continuing to negotiate. And Dave Gordon, the superintendent of Sacramento County's 13 school districts, wrote in a statement Friday that "enough is enough," and that the district and union should reopen schools immediately.
"It’s long past time for the parties to do as all 12 of our other Sacramento districts have managed to do – keep the disputes at the bargaining table and collaboratively work out their differences while children come back to school," Gordon wrote.
Classes have now been out for more than a week in the Sacramento City Unified School District, with teachers and staff still on strike.
On Thursday, State Superintendent Tony Thurmond said he was still in touch with the district and unions, after district leaders declined to meet with him one week ago.
"I urge the board to take emergency action to reach compromise & that SCUSD admin & unions stay at the table around clock to reach an agreement," Thurmond tweeted. "I continue to offer space for negotiations."
All SCUSD schools shut down last Wednesday and will remain closed to students for the duration of the strike.
At least one district board member, Area 7 Trustee Lavinia Grace Phillips, has expressed support for the district’s acceptance of the Sacramento City Teachers Association proposal.
Phillips posted on her Facebook account Tuesday that she believes “the recent SCTA proposal is reasonable” and called for people to “get back to the reason why we are all here… our students.” She was one of the two board members who did not sign the Thursday letter to SCTA, along with student board member Jacqueline Zhang.
Read more about the district’s, SCTA’s and SEIU’s most recent proposals here.
Here’s what to know about the strike, including background on the issues and resources for parents.
Why can’t schools stay during the strike?
Because substitute teachers are represented by the teachers’ union, the district cannot hire them to fill in while the strike is ongoing.
While parents might ask if they can volunteer to keep schools open, the volunteer registration process requires fingerprinting, and according to district Superintendent Jorge Aguilar, “the short window of time is not enough to approve volunteer clearances.”
According to an email sent to all parents in the district on March 21, the district said it is “committed to making up any and all missed special education services, including related services, to all students as a result of the labor strike.”
“All athletic practices, competitions and extracurricular activities are canceled for the duration of the strike,” the district added.
What services will be available for children?
Childcare: 4th R sites — which are operated by the city of Sacramento — will remain open during regular hours. They will be the only childcare provider available at school campuses.
Meals: On Tuesday, the district announced it would distribute grab and go meals — for the duration of the strike — through community distribution locations:
- Shiloh Baptist Church, 3565 9th Avenue
- YMCA, 2021 W. Street
- Boys and Girls Club, 5212 Lemon Hill
- La Familia Maple Neighborhood Center, 3301 37th Avenue
- Old Florin Tech School, 24th and Florin
- Raley’s Supermarket, 4690 Freeport Blvd.
- Raley’s Supermarket, 8391 Folsom Blvd.
- Clayton B. Wire Campus, 5100 El Paraiso Ave
- Floyd Farms, 401 A McClatchy Way *Walk up service only
There will be limited quantities of meals at all SCUSD school locations.
More information about meal pick-up is available here.
COVID-19 testing and vaccinations: Both COVID-19 testing and vaccination clinics will continue with regular hours.
Testing centers:
- Serna Center, 9 a.m. - 4 p.m. Mon-Fri
- Albert Einstein Middle School, 4 - 7 p.m. Mon-Fri
- Meadowview Testing Center, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. Mon-Fri
Vaccination clinics:
- John Still K-8, 2 - 6 p.m., Wednesday, March 23 (UC Davis partnership)
- Luther Burbank High School, 2 - 6 p.m., Thursday, March 24 (UC Davis partnership)
- Serna Center, 4 - 7 p.m., Friday, March 25 (SCUSD Clinic)
- Will C. Wood Middle School, 9 a.m. - 1 p.m., Saturday, March 26 (CDPH)
Striking staff and teachers form a picket line outside C.K. McClatchy High School in Sacramento, Calif., on Wednesday, March 23, 2022.
What do teachers and staff want?
Teachers and staff cite an ongoing staffing shortage, which they say has resulted in overcrowded classrooms and buses, and therefore unsafe working conditions during the pandemic, as reasons for their strike. Union leaders say the district refuses to bargain over the short-staffing crisis, which the district says is out of the scope of current negotiations around safe reopening of schools.
A report made public March 17 has recommendations for the district and teachers’ union to move forward with those negotiations, which have been stalled since December 2021 when the district declared an impasse.
The union has already accepted all those recommendations. The district has accepted only those where the fact-finder agreed with the district.
“Simply put, if the district would accept the fact-finder report we would have a deal and no strike,” SCTA spokesperson Jamie Horowitz said via email.
When asked about the district’s response, district spokesperson Alexander Goldberg sent over Superintendent Aguilar’s statement from March 18.
“The Fact Finding report is advisory, and is intended to help parties resolve differences so a formal agreement can be reached,” Aguilar wrote. “Despite concerns about how some of the recommendations could impact our long term fiscal stability, we are committed to finding solutions that meet the needs of our students and staff.”
Among those recommendations:
- An across-the-board salary increase retroactive to the 2021-22 school year equal to the superintendent’s cost-of-living increase.
- The district should provide retroactive COVID-19 sick leave for October to December 2021, when COVID-19 supplemental sick leave lapsed.
- Teachers who voluntarily agree to substitute — whether on a prep or free period — should be compensated for those hours at 25% above their regular salary.
- Special Education teachers who accept additional students on their caseload should be compensated at 25% above their regular salary.
- The creation of a district/union Health and Safety Committee.
There have been no increases in wages since previous bargaining on a predecessor contract concluded in 2018-19.
The district’s budgets have run a deficit since the 2018-19 school year, but are currently projected to be balanced, according to the first interim report for the 2021-22 school year.
SEIU Local 1021 president Karla Faucett also told CapRadio’s Vicki Gonzalez on Insight March 21 that she’s seen her instructional aides writing curriculum and teaching students because of the staffing shortage.
“They’re working around the clock on their shifts just to take care of our students and it’s seriously harming not only their own selves and their own health, but the safety of everybody,” she said.
There are currently 1,150 students enrolled and 588 students on the waitlist for the district’s Capital City Independent Study program, with 14 teaching vacancies, as of March 14, according to the district. SCUSD moved its deadline for students to report proof of full vaccination or a registered exemption to after the 2021-22 school year, in June, citing its independent study program’s lack of staffing.
Goldberg, the SCUSD spokesperson, said students on the waitlist are either attending their school of residence in-person or are on independent study and receiving instruction through work packets.
Teacher Ingrid Hutchins, who works at Cap City, said on Insight that she voted for a strike because she’s “afraid of what next year will look like for students.”
“Going into summer … what we're going to see is a huge exodus of teachers going to other districts, so our crisis is going to get worse,” Hutchins said. “So for me, voting for the strike was an opportunity to get the district to seriously do something before we're left with, you know, bare bones.”
What does the district say?
In the fact-finding report, the chair said the district’s proposals to increase pay to those who volunteer to take on additional work were an acknowledgment that wages were an important factor in dealing with shortages.
When it comes to wages, the district maintains that current negotiations should only be dealing with issues “directly and specifically” involving the pandemic, such as issues that address substitute teacher pay and caseloads, for continuity of learning, and health and safety regulations.
Aguilar said on CapRadio’s Insight on March 21 that the district, in balancing its budget while negotiating with the teachers union, is trying to “achieve this very difficult balance.”
“We are able to understand that when we have access to one-time funds, those one-time funds are not used to commit to ongoing expenditures,” he said, citing the district board’s passage of a policy codifying that last year.
Over the past two years, the district has received over $276 million in one-time federal COVID-19 funding, including the $154 million from the American Rescue Plan, amounting to over $6,900 per student.
SCUSD is the only district out of the 13 in Sacramento County under fiscal oversight from the County Office of Education, Aguilar said, because it came close to being taken over by the state in 2019.
“That is not a way in which I want to continue to operate, the board of education doesn’t want to continue to operate with this level of fiscal oversight, monitoring every decision that we make, having to justify why it is that we want to invest and how we want to invest,” he said.
Aguilar and Christina Pritchett, president of the district’s board of education, co-wrote an editorial published in the Sacramento Bee on March 22, stating that their goal was not just to avoid a budget crisis, but to keep students in classrooms.
Both Aguilar and the district’s board of education have released statements critiquing the strike’s timing given the impact the pandemic has had on students’ education over the past few years.
The board said that it had “deep concern and compassion” for students who would lose classroom time if the strike happened in a statement it released on March 17.
“Our families will suffer from the uncertainty and lack of stability in the event that schools are forced to close due to a strike,” the statement reads. “The concern for our students is matched by concern for our teachers and our front-line staff who are caught in the middle of this situation.”
When he appeared on Insight, Aguilar called the strike “hurtful.”
He noted that over 70% of SCUSD students are English learners, students who qualify for free/reduced-price meals or foster youth.
“I’m just disheartened by that, the frayed relationships, and they [work stoppages] really create a lot of difficulties for families and students,” he said. “We also understand that this has been a very painful two years, very frustrating for families, very difficult for our students in particular, who have suffered a great deal of trauma.”
When was the last time district employees or teachers went on strike?
The teachers’ union most recently went on a one-day strike in 2019. That was also over the district’s handling of staffing, with SCTA arguing that SCUSD backtracked over a 2017 promise to use health-plan savings to fund class size reductions. The district disputed that.
Prior to that, the union last went on strike in 1989, though it came close to striking in 2017 before Sacramento mayor Darrell Steinberg helped both sides negotiate a deal.
This would be the first strike for SEIU Local 1021, according to union president Faucett.
Last year, after the district resumed in-person instruction, the union’s leadership planned for a two-day strike on April 22 and 23, with the SCTA similarly planning a sympathy strike. The union called off the strike on April 20.
What are the most recent proposals from the union and the district?
The district's most recent proposal to the SCTA, submitted Wednesday, March 30, contains:
- 100% health coverage through Kaiser provided for all employees and their immediate family members.
- For one year, the district will pay 100% of the cost difference between Kaiser insurance and a HealthNet benefit plan for employees who stay enrolled in HealthNet. There will also be a $3,000 stipend for employees moving from a Health Net to Kaiser plan.
- For the 2023-24 school year, the district will pay a stipend worth 50% of the difference in premium costs between HealthNet and Kaiser for employees staying with HealthNet.
- Ongoing 3% salary increase, retroactive to the 2021-22 school year.
- $2,000 signing bonus for new, non-credentialed employees who are hired on or before Sept. 15 for the 2022-23 school year.
- One-time bonuses for full-time employees for each year, starting from 2019-2020 to 2021-2022. The district increased its one-time bonus for the 2021-2022 school year to 3% from the previous 2% it laid out in other proposals. For each year, respectively, the bonuses are 1.5%, 3% and 1.5%.
- A 25% increase in substitute teacher daily rates for substitutes filling in for absent teachers during the 2021-22 school year.
SCTA’s counterproposal to the district, which they say was submitted through a mediator on March 22, was put forth to the district Saturday, March 26, and asks the district to:
- Accept the fact-finder’s recommendations.
- Cancel its switch to Kaiser from HealthNet.
- Establish a standard that determines when a school reverts to distance learning because of staff absences within fifteen days of accepting the counter-proposal.
- Mandate that all district staff and students be fully vaccinated by April 30, except those who have a medical exemption.
- Have N95 or KN95 masks — not surgical masks — available to staff to wear while on school grounds.
- Increase substitute teacher daily rates for substitutes filling in for absent teachers by 25%.
The district’s most recent proposal to SEIU, put forth on Saturday, March 26, contains:
- A 2% ongoing salary increase, effective July 1, 2022.
- One-time bonuses for all SEIU-represented employees for each year, starting from 2020-2021 to 2022-2023. For each year, respectively, the bonuses are $1,000, $1,500 and $1,000.
- $2,000 signing bonus to newly hired, SEIU-represented bus drivers who have completed the SCUSD training program by Oct. 31, 2022. The bonus will be paid on June 30, 2023.
- $5,000 signing bonus to newly hired, fully licensed, SEIU-represented bus drivers hired on or before Sept. 15 for the 2022-23 school year. The bonus will be paid on June 30, 2023.
- $2,000 signing bonus to any current employee who refers a new bus driver to the district for the 2022-23 school year. The bonus will be paid on June 30, 2023.
SEIU’s counterproposal is as follows:
“SEIU Local 1021 seeks equity and social justice for all classified workers recognized by the District [as] having lower paying salaries. To that end SEIU proposes improvements in a total overall economic package that meets or exceeds the agreement with SCTA.”
How did negotiations get to this point?
Since December 2021, when the district declared an impasse, negotiations surrounding the reopening of schools for the 2021-22 school year between the district and SCTA have been at a standstill.
The Sacramento City Teachers Association and Service Employees International Union Local 1021 voted to authorize a strike on March 10.
As a result of the impasse, a fact-finding panel of a chair, union representative and district representative produced a report with recommendations on how to move forward with negotiations. That was made public on March 17, the same day the teachers and employees’ unions announced their strike date.
When state Superintendent Tony Thurmond invited all parties involved to meet on March 25, the district declined the meeting.
"While we appreciate offers from community leaders, including elected officials, to get involved in the negotiations process between our district and our labor partners, this is a local district issue,” SCUSD Superintendent Aguilar said in a video message on March 25.
While the district says short-staffing is not within the scope of current reopening negotiations, the fact-finding panel’s chair wrote in the report that “this Fact Finding does properly include the issue of short staffing as it affects the ability of the District to deal with the pandemic.”
Among the recommendations:
- An across-the-board salary increase retroactive to the 2021-22 school year equal to the superintendent’s cost-of-living increase that year.
- Teachers who voluntarily agree to teach combined classes should be compensated for those hours at 25% above their regular salary.
- Teachers who voluntarily agree to substitute — whether on a prep or free period — should be compensated for those hours at 25% above their regular salary.
- The district should provide retroactive COVID-19 sick leave for October to December 2021, when COVID-19 supplemental sick leave lapsed.
The union agrees with the fact-finder’s recommendations, but the district only agrees with some.
Have a question about the strike? Send it to [email protected] and we’ll try to find an answer.
Pauline Bartolone contributed reporting.
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