Los Angeles Unified School District teachers will receive paid parental leave for the first time after the district and United Teachers Los Angeles reached a tentative contract agreement.
The deal grants UTLA members four weeks of district-paid bonding leave. The union covers 35,000 teachers, counselors, and other educators in LAUSD, the nation’s second-largest school district.
“I cried when I found out about it,” said Erika Jones, secretary-treasurer of the California Teachers Association and an LAUSD elementary school teacher. “It’s precedent-setting.”
She’s right to call it that. While some unions, including those in San Diego, have bargained their way to paid parental leave, most of California’s public school teachers don’t have it. The core problem isn’t union negotiating power. It’s structural. Unlike the majority of private sector workers in California, teachers aren’t covered under the state disability insurance program, which pays between 70% and 90% of wages to eligible workers taking family leave. Public sector employees were never folded into that system when it was built, and decades later the gap is still open.
That gap has real consequences.
Jones said teachers have long been forced to schedule pregnancies around summer break, burning through sick days and vacation time just to cover a few weeks at home with a newborn. It’s not a policy. It’s a workaround.
Stephanie Castro, a middle school teacher in Highland Park, didn’t have even that. She was still managing the financial fallout from unpaid leave she took after her son was born nearly two years ago. “For teachers to have to feel like they’re deciding between spending time with their new child and being able to pay their bills just feels like a terrible situation for humans to be in, at such a very critical, important moment in their lives and their child’s lives,” Castro told LAist.
Castro’s situation isn’t an edge case. It’s what most California teachers face.
Advocates have pushed state legislation to close the gap, but the record isn’t encouraging. Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill in 2019 that would have guaranteed educators at least six weeks of paid leave, citing costs. Separate legislation that would have extended pregnancy leave by up to 14 weeks also failed to get through the legislature.
The current effort is AB 65, a bill that would give California’s approximately 300,000 public school teachers statewide access to paid family leave, cutting out the need for each of the state’s 420,000-plus district employees to win it piece by piece through bargaining. Jones confirmed the California Teachers Association is actively pushing the bill. “We’re hoping that the state recognizes that this is something that we need to fix within the public education system,” she said.
The LAUSD contract doesn’t change the math on that fight. Four weeks of paid leave for 35,000 teachers in one district, while the other roughly 300,000 across California still don’t have it, isn’t a solution. It’s a data point.
Jones doesn’t oversell what the LAUSD deal means, but she doesn’t dismiss it either. “Four weeks is something, it’s not nothing. Is it where we need to be? No … but it is a huge first step,” she said.
What the agreement does accomplish is set an expectation. If LAUSD, a district that enrolls more than 420,000 students and operates under the same fiscal pressures as every other district in the state, can negotiate paid parental leave into a contract, other districts don’t have an easy out for saying it can’t be done. That’s the argument advocates will carry into Sacramento.
AB 65 would make that argument moot by removing the bargaining variable entirely. Whether it clears the legislature is a separate question, and one with a complicated history given the 2019 veto and the legislation that died before even reaching Newsom’s desk.
Castro isn’t waiting on Sacramento to validate what she already learned the hard way. She took unpaid leave. She paid for it financially. And she’s watching other teachers prepare to make the same calculation.