Dublin teachers prepared to go strike Monday after no deal reached, school district says

DUBLIN, Calif. (KGO) — Teachers with the Dublin Unified School District are expected to go on strike on Monday after no deal was reached this weekend.

Teachers have been negotiating with the Dublin Unified School District since September for a new contract. They reached an impasse in November. And called a strike this past Thursday.

You can find out more information on the district’s website here:

Reporter Suzanne Phan will have more on Sunday on ABC7 Eyewitness News at 11 p.m.

This is a breaking news update. Previous story down below.

Dublin High School teachers marched out of school with their personal belongings on Friday in anticipation that they may be on the picket line on Monday.

“The teacher pay is important. But there is one really important element to that. The teacher pay is less about our cost of living and more about teachers can stay here,” explains Catie Tombs, who teachers at Dublin High.

Teachers have been negotiating with the Dublin Unified School District since September for a new contract. They reached an impasse in November. And called a strike on Thursday.

“We have made ourselves available. We are available today. We will be available through the weekend,” says Brad Dobrzenski, President of the Dublin Teachers Association.

The teachers union wants a 3.5% pay raise. But Dobrzenski says the bigger issue is around smaller class size. Smaller classes in high school. And elementary grades to be reduced by two students.

“That was really sort of the pillar that started to topple into a strike authorization. And so we did call a strike last night and we have notified district management,” says Dobrzenski.

What the district is offering came out of independent fact-finding report released this week. The district is proposing a 2.1% pay raise, increases to health care coverage, but only to discuss class size in the future.

“The only way you can reduce class size is to hire more teachers. So, there is an expense for that,” says Superintendent Chris Funk with Dublin Unified School District. “It is just an amount of money that the district cannot afford.”

Superintendent Funk says the district is a facing a $6.5 million deficit. The districts has about 700 teachers who serve 13,000 students across 16 schools.

Schools get paid when students come to class. The union wants the district to take advantage of news laws around independent study as another source of revenue.

“Our district website says we lose about $7 million. So, we were trying to work with that new law, which allows us to do independent study, as short as one day, to ty and catch some of those missing dollars,” says Dobrzenski.

The district says its not opposed to the idea. But that the challenge is that it can’t predict how much the revenue will generate. And it is based on whether parents and teachers both agree to it.

“Yes, we will try it. We will try to streamline it and make it as simple as possible. But once it is all set up, it is out of the hands of the district and in the hands of each individual family and each individual teacher,” says Funk.

If the teachers strike, it will be the first-ever strike since Dublin became its own district in the 1980s. The district says school will be open with supervised classroom instruction. And sports and other afterschool programs will continue as well.