As multiple unions last week celebrated contract settlements that averted a massive, coordinated strike within the 520,000-student Los Angeles school system, teachers in a small district about 15 miles to the southeast quietly prepared to go it alone.
The 200 members of the Little Lake Education Association had reached a breaking point. Months of negotiations with the leadership of their school district had proved fruitless. Their suggestions for money-saving measures that would preserve jobs and critical health care benefits, they said, were dismissed.
