San Diego Unified School District and its teachers union have reached a tentative agreement on a new contract as well as a deal to avoid a one-day strike over special-education staffing.
The agreements announced Friday would resolve two issues — a year of bargaining that went months past the last contract’s end, and an unfair labor practice charge the union filed late last year over special education teachers’ caseloads.
In particular, the district and the San Diego Education Association have agreed on contract language that would guarantee special education teachers an automatic monthly stipend whenever they exceed caseload caps.
“This compensates educators for their time, but even more significantly, it financially incentivizes the district to actually fix staffing issues and provide the support that students and educators need,” the union’s bargaining team told members in an email just before midnight Friday.
Superintendent Fabiola Bagula said Friday that the district was pleased and appreciated families’ patience and flexibility during the process.
“These negotiations, while at times tense, yielded an outcome that will stabilize our educator workforce and ensure all students are supported in the classroom,” she said.
A strike, which had been planned for Feb. 26, would have been the union’s first in decades and would have closed schools throughout the district for one day.
Now that it has been called off, the make-up date that had been set for students, March 9, will return to being a non-instructional day.
San Diego Unified teachers’ previous three-year contract expired last summer. The tentative agreement on a new one — which still must be ratified by union members — comes after a year of bargaining.
The proposed new contract would include new investment in special education and would give teachers 2.5% annual cost-of-living pay raises.
But those raises would take effect only after the district gets Proposition 98 funding that is now being withheld by the state, and would apply retroactively. Once the money comes through, teachers would get a 2.5% raise this year and another 2.5% raise next year.
Those negotiated raises were lower than the ones provided in the last contract, which was ratified in 2023 and guaranteed a 10% retroactive raise with a 5% raise the year after.
Kyle Weinberg, the union president, pointed out in a Friday morning phone call that the raises in the tentative agreement would be higher than what the state funds as a cost-of-living change. for the district. He called it a victory to secure raises in one of the most expensive cities in the country.
“It’s not enough,” he said. He said teachers would need to push the state to “find new revenue sources to be able to increase funding to our schools in the wealthiest state in the country. It is morally reprehensible that we do not fund our schools accordingly.”
Teachers union leader Kyle Weinberg is pictured at a press conference on Feb. 4, 2025. (Alejandro Tamayo / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Richard Barrera, the president of the San Diego Unified school board, said Friday that the agreement would boost support for students with special needs.
A growing share of the district’s students have individualized education plans, or IEPs — legal documents that guide the education of students with disabilities — which has put a strain on educators’ ability to meet the needs of all students.
Barrera said the agreement would make substantial investments in recruiting and retaining special education teachers, in addition to ensuring the stipend.
He said the district’s caseload limit for special education teachers is lower than most.
“But we believe in those lower ratios, and we want to make sure that there is incentive for the district to keep hiring people so that we don’t go above them,” he said.
Barrera said the agreement’s pay raises — which depend on Proposition 98 funding, or the required annual minimum spending on education coming from the state — incentivizes both the district and its teachers to push the Legislature and governor to release the funding.
“It’s not okay to essentially borrow money from the schools to help pay off the rest of the state’s deficit,” he said.
In his proposed January budget, Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed withholding $5.6 billion from the total funding Proposition 98 guarantees to schools.
His budget projects that schools and community colleges will end up being entitled to $6.9 billion more than the state’s June estimates, but he wants to withhold the bulk of that for now, EdSource has reported.
This week, Bagula and Sabrina Bazzo, the vice president of the district’s board, were in Sacramento to push for more state money, including full Prop. 98 funding.
The state would be legally obligated to release that funding in full eventually, per EdSource, but could defer it until 2027-28. The California School Boards Association sued the state over a similar move in 2024.