LOS ANGELES (CNS) - Former Los Angeles Unified School Board President Steve Zimmer appears to be helping facilitate today's talks between district and union leaders in an effort to bring an end to a teachers strike that has extended into a fifth day.
Zimmer has been working for Mayor Eric Garcetti's office as a senior adviser on education policy since September of 2017, a role he took a few months after he lost a re-election bid in May of that year to Nick Melvoin. Garcetti's office has been mediating the latest round of negotiations since Thursday. Zimmer was in the hallway Friday morning outside Garcetti's City Hall office speaking with some United Teachers Los Angeles leaders just before talks were set to resume, but declined to answer any questions.
Garcetti's office said that Matt Szabo, the mayor's deputy chief of staff, has been leading the office's facilitation of the UTLA/LAUSD negotiations, but did not respond to repeated questions asking if Zimmer has been involved in the talks. During his re-election campaign in 2017, Zimmer had the strong support of labor unions and UTLA, but was targeted by charter school backers who poured millions of dollars into the race on behalf of Melvoin, hoping to shift the balance of power on the seven-member board in support of charters.
The regulation of charter schools, including the co-location of charters on some district campuses, has been one of the issues under discussion in contract negotiations. UTLA sees the growth of charters as a threat to the stability of the district because charters are mostly nonunion and have been steadily draining the district's enrollment numbers for years.
Zimmer and Garcetti have been political allies, with Garcetti endorsing Zimmer during his 2017 re-election bid, and Zimmer also endorsing Garcetti's re-election the same year, which he won in a landslide. But Zimmer has played a mostly quiet, behind-the-scenes role in Garcetti's administration as a policy adviser, and vowed after his loss to Mevoin to never run for public office again.
The 2017 election cycle is believed to have been one of the most expensive school board elections in history, with an estimated $15 million being spent by and on behalf of the various candidates The end result was a 4-3 pro-charter school board for the first time.
That pro-charter board, on a 5-2 vote, then installed Austin Beutner as superintendent in May, with board members George McKenna and Scott Schmerelson objecting. Beutner was seen by UTLA as a charter school advocate, and the union's objection and negative rhetoric about his installment as superintendent contributed to the breakdown in contract negotiations.
Zimmer was first elected to the school board in 2009 after seventeen years as a teacher and counselor at Marshall High School in Los Angeles.