Mount Diablo Unified teachers threaten to strike

Teachers in the Mount Diablo Unified School District have authorized their union to declare a strike if salary negotiations that have stalled with the two sides 5% apart don’t take a turn for the best.

The Mount Diablo Education Association announced Wednesday that 92% of its members voted to support a strike if one is called.

A strike would affect about 29,000 K-12 students in the district, which has campuses in Concord, Pleasant Hill, Walnut Creek, Martinez, Clayton, Pittsburg and Lafayette, as well as the Pacheco, Bay Point and Clyde communities.

Any decision to strike will have to wait until later this month, however, when the state Public Employment Relations Board is expected to release a non-binding recommendation to the two sides on how to proceed.

“I am very hopeful we will be able to get an agreement negotiated before then,” union president Anita Johnson said. “We will definitely take that (recommendation) very seriously.”

Although no negotiating sessions have been scheduled, Johnson expects the two sides to resume talks when they present their cases to the employment board’s fact-finding panel.

The district has offered teachers a 7% raise over the next three school years and a 3% bonus this school year. But the union wants at least a 12.5% raise over the same period, pointing to rising inflation rates and the need to pay competitive salaries.

Superintendent Adam Clark maintains there simply isn’t room in the budget for that kind of wage increase, especially because the district cannot use one-time COVID-19 relief funds to pay ongoing salaries.

“We are facing a structural deficit that’s at the foundation of our problems,” Clark said. “The union continues to not understand our finances and puts out false information about how we are flush with money.”

Strike talks have loomed since December when the two sides declared an impasse and summoned an independent state mediator to help forge a resolution.

When called, strikes typically happen after the state employment board makes a recommendation based on fact finding.

Teachers, union representatives and other community members held a rally Wednesday at the district’s administration office. There, they  complained about last month’s school board decision to cut fourth-grade music programs to reduce costs, saying it was an example of the district’s unwillingness to prioritize students.

And in December, all five labor unions associated with Mount Diablo Unified issued votes of no confidence in the district’s chief business officer, Lisa Marie Gonzalez.

Clark defended Gonzalez’s job performance, calling the no-confidence votes a “union tactic” to discredit the source of the district’s budget analysis.

Johnson, who has served as union president for four years, said teachers last went on strike in 1977.

Tensions between the district and union previously escalated when teachers didn’t want to return to the classrooms for in-person instruction during the 2020-21 winter. That’s when COVID-19 cases began to decline following a surge.

The union wanted distance learning to continue until COVID cases dropped even further, especially in communities hit harder by the virus. After a stretch of around-the-clock negotiations, the two sides compromised on a hybrid-learning model in the early spring.