Sacramento city teachers to strike next week as dispute over staffing drags on

Unions that represent Sacramento City Unified School District teachers and classified staff on Thursday announced an “open-ended” strike that they plan to begin next week.

The announcement for a strike beginning Wednesday, March 23 came at a rally outside the Serna Center, the district headquarters, where hundreds gathered in support of the teachers, bus drivers, and maintenance workers.

The strike will affect about 40,000 students in the district, who have been on campus since the start of the school year after spending months at home learning online during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Sacramento City Teachers Association and SEIU Local 1021 plan to participate in the trike.

“We know what we need and we are going to make sure we tell them to give those things to our kids,” Sacramento City Teachers Association Vice President Nikki Milevsky said.

Union leadership said there has been no progress in their months-long negotiations with Sacramento City Unified. The unions say they are at odds over teacher staffing shortages and what they say are a cut in educator’s take-home pay.

Union officials also said more than 500 students in the district’s independent study program have not received adequate instruction.

They want the district to quickly hire more staff. David Fisher, president of the teachers union, said thousands of students still don’t have a regular teacher for the school year, and thousands of others don’t have a substitute, forcing children to gather in campus cafeterias

If the union follows through with the walkout, it would be the second Sacramento teacher strike in four years. The teachers union also went on a one-day strike in 2019, when it protested alleged unfair labor practices.

Union members also authorized strikes in 2017 and 2021, although those walkouts were averted.

Superintendent Jorge Aguilar in a written statement said the district is committed to working through the current impasse process and to continuing successor contract negotiations with the teachers union.

He previously called the unions’ move to strike “hurtful to all of our families that have been waiting for their children’s school experience to get back to normal.”

The strike announcement followed months of negotiations, according to the district and the union.

The district declared impasse in December 2021, when it laid out several proposals “including continuity of instructional programs, extra pay for substitutes, extra pay for nurses, independent study, health and safety (reopening), training specialists and implementation of the district’s vaccination resolution.”

Short on Sacramento bus drivers, teachers

The district said it cannot provide the extra pay without it being negotiated, and that union has not agreed to a package of COVID-related proposals.

The district has said the two parties have not been able to come to agreement on how to address a staffing shortage.

People at the union rally said the staffing shortage affected both students and staff.

Karla Faucett, president of the district’s SEIU Local 1021 chapter, said bus drivers are taking on extra routes because they are under-staffed.

“We are the ones on the front line,” said Edward Kemble Elementary School teacher Rose Vincent, who has been teaching in the district for 22 years. “We are losing teachers everyday. And so many kids don’t have subs. It affects kids more than you can imagine”

Board wants district, union bargaining to resume

Delaney McClure of Sacramento is a long-term substitute with the district who just began an assignment with a fifth grade class at Peter Burnett elementary school. While she is scheduled to teach until the end of the school year, McClure said she won’t cross the picket line.

“I stand with the teachers” she said. I don’t stand by the decisions of the district.”

School Board President Christina Pritchett said she is worried both about students and the district’s employees.

“The concern for our students is matched with concern for our teachers and frontline staff who are caught in the middle of these situations,” she said. “So many of them have told me personally that they simply want the labor leaders and district to manage negotiations at the bargaining table so that they can focus on teaching and learning.”

This story was originally published March 17, 2022 at 4:47 PM.