Mayor Daniel Lurie and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi on Sunday made 11th-hour appeals for San Francisco teachers and the school district to come to an agreement, less than 24 hours before a strike is set to begin and close schools citywide.
Barring that, both asked for a 72-hour delay of Monday’s strike date — and were spurned.
Lurie issued a statement a little after 1 p.m., asking for “three additional days for the conversations to continue” between the teachers union and the school district.
He urged both sides to continue negotiations on Sunday “to reach an agreement” that both “supports our hardworking educators” and ensures “fiscal stability” for the district.
Pelosi issued her own statement echoing Lurie’s call: “I support the Mayor’s ask that there be three additional days for conversations to continue.” State Sen. Scott Wiener did the same.
The teachers union, in a press conference held near the same time, said it had not received an acceptable proposal yet from the San Francisco Unified School District and that, until it did, the walkout would move forward as planned.
“We will be going on strike on Monday absent a signed tentative agreement,” said Cassondra Curiel, president of the United Educators of San Francisco.
Schools are set to close across the city on Monday morning, and teachers plan to picket their worksites. The two sides have been in talks since March and negotiated on Saturday from 11 a.m. to almost 10 p.m.
There was “some movement” from the district yesterday, Curiel said, namely an “important win” to insert protections for undocumented students into the union contract.
But negotiations “didn’t go far enough,” she added. “We have made it very clear that our demands are for fully funded family healthcare, for educators improvements to special education, and salary increases that do not come at the cost of concessions or takeaways.”
The union passed an offer to the district at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Curiel said, and received a counteroffer at 8:10 p.m. Union officials are “working hard” to send a response, but need more information from the district to do so, Curiel said.
Curiel said bargaining may continue Sunday if the union receives that information.
“We need to see there’s serious movement,” she said. “We’ll be on strike on Monday without an agreement.”
Superintendent Maria Su, for her part, sent a statement Sunday morning, saying she was “deeply frustrated and disheartened” not to reach an agreement the prior night. After missing the prior session, Su was present during Saturday’s negotiations alongside the district’s bargaining team.
Su said she was “ready to work on reaching a full agreement” and to “return to the bargaining table” on Sunday.
The school district has had plenty of time to bargain in good faith. Solidarity with the teachers!
The gap between the two sides is so wide that negotiation is futile. So I think the union is right here – just go out on strike and let’s see who folds first. I suspect it will be the teachers.
SFUSD is as dysfunctional as SF’s historically anti-housing planning process has been.
Ultimately, the State — with a spectrum of pro-housing laws has had to step in (and will continue to have to step in) in order streamline the planning process by overriding the NIMBY-driven status quo. Thx to the youth-led pro-housing YIMBY movement, the first step has been zoning/entitlement reform; this coming year will be impact / exaction fee reform that similarly stymies housing creation.
Accordingly, the State will ultimately have to step in and take over SFUSD in order to finally compel it to work within its (tax) revenue stream and the economic realities of declining enrollments** — largely due the continually rising costs of housing on account of the past 5+ decades of it’s anti-housing policies resulting in skyrocketing housing costs which have caused families to flee the City and, therefore its school system — go figure! 😉
** In the 60’s there were over 92K students, today there are less than 56K — a decline of over 39%; yet SFUSD has been incapable of accomplishing the closing of under-populated campuses and reigning in administrative bloat in order to right-size during this period.
“Right-size” is a notorious euphemism, are you trying to be funny here?
A billionaire and a centimillionaire, Democrats, attempt to prevail on low paid teachers to suck it up and go back to work.
When Gavin Newson dropped in and mangled concessions from BART during the last BART strike, he set the expectation that similar efforts like we see now from Lurie and Pelosi would follow a similar tack. As this doesn’t present itself, I’d go on strike as well, to see if they come around and pressure SFUSD same way as Newson did on BART.
Strike and revive prop 15 or some other measure here (Ideally prop 13 was repealed in whole, but there’s no chance of that). We shouldn’t be subsidizing corporations and speculators off the back of our kids education.
Joe too,
Did you get where Chan and Chakrabarti stand ?
Be interesting to see if my candidate Chan is backing labor here.
Where’s AGI when you need it ?
h.
The school district has had nearly a year to bargain with the teachers’ union. How will three more days help.
Lurie should have been moderating this issue between the district and the union from day 1 of his administration, not wait until the last minute.