Over a Thousand Teachers Strike in Richmond for Themselves and Their Students

Update: Dec. 10 2:30pm PST — United Teachers of Richmond reached a tentative agreement with West Contra Costa Unified School District early this morning after a twelve hour bargaining session. The deal includes an 8% raise over two years (up from the district’s pre-strike proposal of 3%), 100% healthcare coverage (up from the district’s pre-strike proposal of 80%), and additional retention bonuses for new teachers who stay in the district, as well as other agreements. Teachers will vote today on the deal. In the meantime, they agreed to return to work Wednesday in order to prepare for their classes, which will resume on Thursday if they ratify the agreement.

More than a thousand educators walked off the job last Thursday in the first teacher strike in West Contra Costa Unified School District’s history, drawing crowds of teachers, students, and union supporters to picket lines across the district, which includes public schools from Richmond and San Pablo all the way to Hercules, Pinole and El Cerrito.

The open-ended strike, in its fourth day as of Tuesday, is meant to pressure the district, which serves nearly 25,000 students, to reach an agreement over wages and healthcare, with the goal of attracting and retaining a stable staff of teachers. Strike participation has been virtually unanimous, according to the United Teachers of Richmond (UTR), and a large majority of students have declined to attend school during the strike. Meanwhile, workers told Current, the district’s threats to hire short-term substitutes en masse have proven empty.

“We’ve been building, building, building for a couple of years to get to this point where 99.9% of educators are out here on the strike line,” Niko Villars, a social sciences teacher at Pinole Valley High School, told Current. “People are excited. People are sick of this…. It feels like this explosion of energy, like finally we can express what’s been going on for so long.”

Workers said that years of wage stagnation have created a “vacancy crisis” — dozens of unfilled teaching positions in West Contra Costa schools — that undermines students’ education in the district. Since 2018, nearly 1,500 teachers have left the district for jobs in other places — turnover roughly equal to the district’s total number of teaching staff — and right now, mid-semester, there are currently 70 teaching vacancies across West Contra Costa’s 56 schools (up from 40 vacancies at the end of the 2021-22 school year). These vacancies mean larger class sizes, over-burdened educators, cuts or pauses to core subjects, expensive contractors teaching on an ad hoc basis, and reduced access to essential services and programs like special education.

“This year we couldn’t hire a physics teacher. That represents about half of our ninth graders with no quality science education,” Villars said. “Last year we had no eleventh grade English teacher; that’s about half of our eleventh graders with no quality English education. And these are essential courses. You know, these kids have to compete in colleges and in the workplace with people from other districts who had teachers in their classrooms.”

“Look, if I was a new teacher, I’m not gonna come here if I can make $10,000 [a year] more to work ten minutes away in the Berkeley schools, or the Albany schools, or Mount Diablo Unified [School District], or San Francisco, or literally any other district,” Villars said.

“I did an informal poll of my students this week, and in every class, when I asked, ‘Have you ever had a year without a teacher?’ about 80% of my students raised their hands,” said Eric W. Jepson, an English teacher at El Cerrito High and a member of UTR’s bargaining team. “That’s not education, and we have to fix that.”

Jepson told Current an anecdote about a former colleague who left the district after finding it impossible to locate housing in the area, due to her low salary and the Bay’s high cost of living. “Teachers are professionals, and beyond that, they’re human beings,” Jepson said. “People have a right to live where they work.”

West Contra Costa Unified School District serves many of the poorest families in the county (Richmond and San Pablo are the two Bay Area cities with the highest poverty rates) and has higher rates of English learners than most other Contra Costa districts.

Superintendent Cheryl Cotton has argued that the district is constrained in its response to the vacancy crisis by its “severe budget situation.” But in a mediation and fact-finding process through the California Public Employee Relations Board (PERB), triggered after the union declared an impasse in negotiations in August, a neutral mediator found that a substantial raise was feasible and recommended that the district offer teachers a 6% pay increase over one year and cover a greater portion of teachers’ healthcare costs.

‘‘‘Stay on the picket line as long as you need to, we totally support you.’ So we hope it doesn’t have to take that long, but it’s great to feel like the whole community — everybody — has our backs.”

Before the strike, the district’s offer stood at a 3% raise over the next two years, but over the weekend, with the strike ongoing, they raised their offer to 7%. Teachers countered with a 9% raise over the same period (down from their initial demand of 10%), including a retroactive salary increase that would cover the past few months of negotiations, as well as pay for each day of the strike equal to what the district had said it would pay temporary substitute teachers. Further negotiations were scheduled to take place Tuesday.

West Contra Costa Unified School District could not be reached directly for comment.

Teachers were joined for the first two days of the strike by West Contra Costa custodians, food service workers, and bus drivers represented by Teamsters Local 856, but the striking Teamsters reached an agreement with the district on Sunday and returned to work on Monday. It was clear on Tuesday, however, that the Teamsters agreement had not done much to dissuade striking teachers, who were still picketing in large numbers, or to encourage absent students to return to school. Some families, misled by the district’s announcement of the Teamsters agreement over the weekend, showed up to district schools on Monday, only to turn around and go home when they found teachers still walking the picket line.

Community support was especially strong at Harding Elementary in El Cerrito, just down the street from El Cerrito High, where students and their families held homemade picket signs, marching and chanting alongside staff members. “[We] met with our parents on Tuesday, before this started, and they were amazing,” said Marlowe Kim, a kindergarten teacher at Harding and a UTR representative for her site. “They basically said, ‘Stay on the picket line as long as you need to, we totally support you.’ So we hope it doesn’t have to take that long, but it’s great to feel like the whole community — everybody — has our backs.”

Families on the picket line, Kim said “are teaching their kids about something really significant. And at this point in history in our country, it feels really good to be doing something this positive.”