The teachers won a 6 percent pay raise and caps on class sizes, which had become one of the most contentious issues between the union and district officials. The city and county will also spend money to expand services in schools, including hiring more nurses, counselors and psychologists.
The settlement came after tens of thousands of teachers marched in downtown Los Angeles and picketed outside schools for six school days, and after a round of marathon negotiating sessions over the holiday weekend.
The contract still needs to be ratified by the roughly 30,000 members of the union, but that approval is widely expected. Teachers are expected to be back in their classrooms Wednesday morning.
“Today is a day full of good news,” Mayor Eric Garcetti said during a news conference Tuesday morning at City Hall, as he stood alongside Austin Beutner, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, and Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles.
“The strike is painful and had a cost,” the mayor added. “But there is no question to get here, the strike helped.”
The Los Angeles strike was the eighth major teacher walkout over the past year, as a movement that calls itself Red For Ed spread like wildfire from West Virginia to Oklahoma, Arizona, Chicago and beyond. But the strike in Los Angeles was a union-led one against Democratic leaders who are usually on their side. It also was one of the first to highlight one of the most controversial questions in education: whether charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, hurt traditional schools.
Many of the changes — including class-size caps and full-time nurses at every school — would be phased in over time, officials said. Caputo-Pearl said the deal ending the strike would include new regulations on the charter sector, which already educates roughly 20 percent of public school students in Los Angeles.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.