Los Alamitos High School teachers concerned about safety during the pandemic are looking at a possible strike beginning Tuesday, Sept. 29, the first day their campus is scheduled to reopen for in-person learning.
On Saturday morning, Sept. 26, the Los Alamitos Unified School District board called for an emergency meeting, where it declared the potential work stoppage an emergency and authorized the superintendent to hire substitutes to fill spots.
Board President Meg Cutuli said after the meeting that trustees are looking to hire substitute teachers to ensure there will be adults on campus should the high school teachers not show up to work Tuesday.
“If the teachers show up, we will not use the substitutes in lieu of our teachers,” Cutuli said.
If approved by the union, it would mark the first strike of educators during the coronavirus pandemic in Southern California, and possibly the state, said Ed Sibby, of the California Teachers Association.
Los Alamitos high school teachers said they’re willing to return to campus, with many looking forward to it, but they are concerned the district has waited until the last minute to implement safety measures and they want to make sure those are in place before the campus reopens.
“We are really hoping we can come to an agreeable resolution that will provide for a safe environment for our students and teachers,” David Eisenberg, a science teacher and leader in the Los Alamitos Educators Association, said Saturday afternoon.
The high school teachers, some 125, are expected to meet online Sunday to “look for a solution,” and possibly vote for a strike, Eisenberg said.
“We don’t want a work stoppage. We want to be working,” he said. “We just want to be make sure that when we’re working, it’s safe for us and our students.”
Among the teachers’ concerns, Eisenberg said, is the proper ventilation inside the high school’s classrooms. Most high school classes have windows that do not open and their doors lead to indoor corridors. The district agreed to provide HEPA filters, but they were only delivered on Friday, Sept. 25. Eisenberg said it’s unclear whether there are enough for the entire school or whether they will be installed by Tuesday.
But Superintendent Andrew Pulver said every room in the high school is equipped with the new air filtration.
Other concerns include: who will do the cleaning and how often in the classrooms, whether there is enough room to maintain 6 feet of social distancing and how can groups of 1,200 or more students broken up into morning and afternoon shifts be considered small “cohorts.”
Pulver said in an interview that the district is meeting or exceeding state guidelines, and the two sides are engaged in “cordial, productive meetings.”
“I’m optimistic that our teachers will show up to work Tuesday to welcome back our students,” he said.
Eisenberg said both sides were close to reaching a memorandum of understanding, with district officials “finally making concessions for the safety and health” of its staff and students.
“But they’re running up against their own artificial deadline,” he said.
Union officials asked the district to wait 10 business days from the day they reach a memorandum of understanding so they could confirm that safety measures, such as the new filters, are in place and working. Pulver said such an agreement could be weeks away and the district does not want to wait so long to reopen for in-person instruction.
Teachers also want to see clarification that there’s enough staff to clean and disinfect as promised.
“The community thinks that custodians will be doing all the cleaning. But the students are required to clean their own station at the beginning and end of each period,” Eisenberg said.
The high schoolers, who started classes Aug. 31 online, are set to transition to a hybrid model with some time on campus starting Tuesday.
Los Alamitos Unified was the first public school district in Orange County to request a waiver to allow for its six elementary schools to reopen in-person. Since then, all school campuses in Orange County have been allowed to reopen at the discretion of their districts. Los Alamitos’s two middle schools have already started a hybrid of in-person and distance learning.
Conditions at the high school, versus the other campuses, are different, Eisenberg and others said.
The goal throughout the state is to keep students together throughout the day in small groups, called cohorts. For younger students, that translates to groups of no more than 18 kids who study, play and eat together. At the high school, which has some 2,600 students (not counting about 500 students who have chosen to remain online,) the cohorts are divided into morning and afternoon shifts four days a week. That means at least 1,200 students are changing classes and moving about the campus as one cohort.
The high school classrooms, compared to elementary schools and McAuliffe and Oak middle schools, also are smaller and separation would be more difficult, teachers have told the trustees in recent meetings.
“We’re going to be expected to keep social distance, which is going to be a physical impossibility in a room that’s 960 square feet,” biology teacher Drew Sells told the board during a meeting Tuesday, Sept. 22.
On Saturday, Sells checked out his classroom in a building he called “a petri dish,” because the windows don’t open and doors open to hallways. He said a new heating, air conditioning and ventilation system was installed and air ducts were opened to allow greater fresh air to come in. Still, he would have liked for the district to have installed this weeks ago, to allow the union to confirm that all is in working order.
On the question of a strike, Sells said he would consider it, but added: “I don’t think anybody wins with a strike.”
The district and the teachers’ union have been hashing out a memorandum of understanding since the start of summer. One point the district agreed to a few days ago involved what type of face masks would be acceptable on campus. Out are neck gaiters, bandannas and masks with vents, which are not as protective as other face coverings.
District officials posted on Friday night an online notice of the 10 a.m. meeting Saturday. While it was open to the public, the meeting was not streamed live or recorded. Asked about the apparent lack of transparency, the superintendent said that it was an emergency meeting called due to a threat of a work stoppage and that the community had 16-hour notice instead of the legally required one-hour notice.
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