District, TALB Agree to Impasse Process on Raises, Pupil-Free Days

District, TALB Agree to Impasse Process on Raises, Pupil-Free Days

Bargaining teams for the Long Beach Unified School District and the Teachers Association of Long Beach met today and mutually agreed to proceed to impasse regarding compensation and adding pupil-free days beginning in 2024-25. Significant progress has been made throughout the bargaining sessions on contract language for many of the proposed contract articles. The District enhanced its compensation offer today but did not move from its position of seeking to add four paid pupil-free days. The TALB team indicated they did not have authorization to go beyond their counter-offer today of two additional pupil-free days. Based upon thousands of feedback points, including from teachers, the District has proposed adding the pupil-free days to provide staff the opportunity for collaboration, review of student data and/or site-based training. In an effort to reach a compromise with TALB, the District increased its salary offer – for the second time – now going from 8% ongoing and 3% one-time raises, to 8.5% ongoing and 3.5% one-time raises. The 8.5% raise would be retroactive to July 1, 2022, and the 3.5% one-time raise would be based on earnings from July 1, 2022 through June 30, 2023.

Examples of how an 8.5% on-schedule raise would benefit TALB members of varying salaries are provided here. The average salary for an LBUSD teacher is $95,000.

In addition to the retroactive checks for the ongoing salary increase, the sample breakdowns for the proposed 3.5% one-time off-schedule payments are as follows:

Formal Impasse Mediation

The impasse process is overseen by the state Public Employee Relations Board (PERB).  A “third-party neutral” (mediator) is mutually selected by TALB and the District, and the parties work on developing an agreement. If the two bargaining teams are unsuccessful at reaching agreement, the state mediator will recommend that both parties proceed to the next step of the impasse process called fact-finding. Fact-finding is a process overseen by PERB where an independent panel presents a written summary of the facts presented by both sides, and makes recommendations for how to resolve a dispute when both parties have been unable to reach an agreement during the initial mediation stage. The District will file the appropriate documentation with PERB and looks forward to reaching a compromise with TALB.