Los Angeles teachers won’t walk off the job Tuesday. At least, not yet.
Los Angeles Unified School District and United Teachers Los Angeles reached a tentative two-year labor agreement Sunday morning, pulling the district back from the edge of a strike that would have shut down schools and upended the routines of families across the city.
The deal includes an 11.65% increase to salary scales and raises the starting teacher salary to $77,000 per year. It also locks in four weeks of district-paid parental leave, expanded student mental health supports, and a first-ever 20-to-1 ratio for special education specialist teachers. The ongoing cost to the district: $650 million, according to a district spokesperson.
Not nothing.
“These wins reflect the progress we’ve fought for, enabling educators to stay fully focused on supporting students’ learning and well-being,” said Cecily Myart-Cruz, the union’s president, in a statement released Sunday.
UTLA’s bargaining team said it “enthusiastically recommends” that union members vote to ratify the contract. Both the union’s membership and the Los Angeles Unified Board of Education still need to approve the deal before it’s final.
The agreement also includes what the district called “a comprehensive agreement on inclusive practices and staffing,” reduced secondary counseling ratios, and smaller class sizes for 11th and 12th graders. There are also new contract protections against subcontracting and the use of AI.
UTLA had been pushing hard. The union’s original ask was a 17% raise over two years and a minimum starting salary of nearly $78,000, which would have been a 13% increase. Bargaining teams had met more than a dozen times since negotiations began in February 2025. The members had voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike after talks stalled, giving union leadership the power to call a walkout. April 14 was the hard deadline.
Sunday’s agreement covers teachers, but it doesn’t close the book on Tuesday’s threatened strike.
Two other unions haven’t reached deals yet. SEIU Local 99, which represents about 30,000 support staff including bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and classroom and campus aides, is still at the table. So is Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, which represents district administrators. A district spokesperson told LAist that negotiations with both unions are ongoing and that the district expects to settle those contracts before Tuesday. Whether schools would close if those deals don’t come through is, as of Sunday, still undetermined.
That uncertainty matters. A full strike, one that pulled teachers alongside support staff and administrators, would have disrupted the education of roughly 400,000 students. Families had already started making contingency plans.
The broader context here is a district that’s been under pressure for a while. Unions across the district have spent more than a year at the bargaining table, pushing on pay, benefits, and what they say is a need for more student support resources. The political moment has made those conversations harder. LAUSD, like most large urban districts, has been managing tight budgets while trying to hold onto experienced teachers in one of the most expensive regions in the country.
Still, Sunday felt like real progress.
For UTLA members specifically, the contract represents movement on several fronts they’d been pushing. The 20-to-1 special education specialist ratio is new ground. So are the AI protections, which signal that teachers, not just tech companies, want some say in how artificial intelligence gets used in classrooms. The parental leave expansion addresses a gap that advocates had flagged for years.
Whether rank-and-file teachers feel the deal is enough is another question, one that the ratification vote will answer. Myart-Cruz’s team is clearly betting yes.
The next 48 hours belong to SEIU Local 99 and Associated Administrators of Los Angeles. If those two unions don’t get to a deal, Tuesday’s picture gets complicated fast. The district says it’s working to get there. The unions haven’t said otherwise publicly.
For now, Los Angeles teachers are staying in their classrooms. For the families of 400,000 students, that counts for something.