Your donation will help us produce journalism like this. Please give today.

LA Unified teachers will return to school next week with no new UTLA contract.

Negotiators met for the second time yesterday, and the next session is not scheduled until Aug. 21 — nine days after school starts.

While the teachers union put out a press release yesterday, chiding the district for not being cooperative, the district’s chief negotiator, Vivian Ekchian, said the meeting was constructive.

“I would say it was productive,” Ekchian told LA School Report.

Among the topics covered over the three hour meeting, she said, were the budget, staffing, and class size reductions.

But in the press release, the union accused the district of giving them a Sophie’s Choice of smaller classes or salary increases. Not both, which the union says the district can afford.

“We don’t buy it,” the release said. “We believe the district is trying to pit educators against parents and the community.”

Union President Alex Caputo-Pearl told LA School Report yesterday that teachers have been waiting for the district to provide line-by-line numbers for the district’s base expenditures. Ekchian says they began to do that “in a very global way” and will delve more deeply into the budget in future meetings.

 Previous Posts: UTLA’s Caputo-Pearl: ‘Our goal is to win a good contract’; LA Unified, teachers meeting today to discuss a contract; Teachers union calls district contract offer ‘a non-starter’