Dive Brief:
- A handful of unionized charter schools in Los Angeles have been sending their teachers back to Los Angeles Unified to file for retirement and claim their benefits from the district rather than the charter, a move that has the district up in arms but has drawn support from the city's teacher union.
- The Los Angeles Times reports charters opted out of the district’s benefit system, but in prior years 49 teachers have returned to the district to retire, some at the urging of the El Camino Real charter, which provided $30,000 bonuses for the move.
- All of the teachers who returned to the district to retire had spent the majority of their careers with Los Angeles Unified, but the district is refusing costs that could total up to $300,000 per teacher.
Dive Insight:
The vast majority of charter schools do not have unions. That is true for the majority of charter schools in LAUSD, too. But charter schools are, technically, public schools. The idea of having charter school teachers associated with the traditional school district for benefits could make sense, particularly when both sets of teachers bargain under the same union.
The charter school would have to pay a fair share of the cost, though. Benefits are calculated based on the amount of time a person works as well as how much they got paid in their career. If charter schools were routinely allowed to pass off retirement costs to the district, they could be tempted to sweeten the compensation packages of end-of-career teachers to bump up their benefits packages. They, after all, wouldn’t have to deal with the financial consequences of such a move.