Twin Rivers teachers end first-ever strike with tentative deal, but distrust over school finances lingers

On a chilly Thursday morning in early March, traffic slowed to a crawl outside the Twin Rivers Unified School District office at McClellan Park as a river of educators in red shirts spilled into the street. They waved signs reading “On strike for students” and “We can’t wait” while passing cars answered with a steady chorus of honks.

“We love our students. We want to be in the classroom with our students,” Twin Rivers United Educators President Brittoni Ward told the crowd on March 5. “But we should be in the classroom with fully funded health care for our families, with competitive wages that recruit and retain.”

With that walkout, Twin Rivers teachers launched the first strike in the district’s 18-year history, disrupting normal instruction for roughly 25,000 students across 49 campuses in north Sacramento, North Highlands, Rio Linda and surrounding communities.

The work stoppage — which stretched more than two weeks before teachers returned under a tentative agreement March 23 — centered on familiar issues of pay, health benefits and class size. But beneath those demands lay a deeper fight over money and trust in a high-poverty district that has weathered years of financial controversy, including a massive charter school fraud case and repeated waivers from a state classroom-spending rule.

A high-need district, and a high-stakes fight

Twin Rivers Unified formed in 2008 when voters approved merging four small districts in northern Sacramento County. Today, district data show nearly all its students are considered high need: about 95% are English learners, foster youth or eligible for free or reduced-price meals.

Ward and the union she leads, Twin Rivers United Educators, say that makes the stakes of every budget decision higher.

“Every single day, more than 2,000 of our students are left without a permanent, credentialed teacher in their classroom,” Ward said at a rally the week of the strike, blaming uncompetitive pay and high health costs for what the union describes as chronic vacancies.

After more than a year of bargaining, an impasse and a state-mandated fact-finding process, educators voted in early February to authorize a strike. The union’s public demands included a 7.5% raise, fully paid family health coverage, smaller classes and more support staff, particularly in classrooms serving students with disabilities and English learners.

Many teachers pointed to their health insurance premiums as a breaking point. Several said they paid around $1,600 a month out of pocket for family coverage — a cost some described as akin to a second mortgage.

The district’s offer, and warnings about solvency

The district countered that its offer already stretched thin finances. In letters to staff and families before and during the strike, Superintendent Steve Martinez’s administration said it accepted the independent fact-finder’s recommendations “in full” and was “ready to sign this agreement today.”

That proposal included a 2.5% raise in the 2025-26 school year and a 2.21% raise in 2026-27 — a cumulative 4.71% increase — with the first year retroactive to July 1, 2025. Twin Rivers also offered to pay 100% of the premium for Kaiser Permanente family medical coverage for two years, which the district said would cost tens of thousands of dollars per employee annually.

District leaders portrayed the package as generous by local standards, and argued that going further would put Twin Rivers on the same path as neighboring districts that have struggled financially after agreeing to large compensation increases.

In a March 4 message, the district pointed to Sacramento City, West Contra Costa and other California districts that granted significant raises and fully paid health care in recent years and later faced multimillion-dollar deficits, layoffs and heightened state fiscal oversight.

“We will not jeopardize the fiscal health of the district or put our students at risk of losing academic programs, services and staff,” the district wrote.

The 55% rule, waivers and a “skim scam” dispute

Union leaders and many teachers were unconvinced. Their skepticism was rooted in a longer history that, they say, shows how local officials have managed school funding when they had discretion.

Central to that history is a little-known provision of California education law that requires school districts to spend at least 55% of their “current expense of education” on classroom teacher salaries. County offices of education can grant waivers to districts that fall short of that threshold.

Records show that Twin Rivers repeatedly requested and received such waivers from the Sacramento County Office of Education for six straight years, beginning in the 2019-20 school year. An analysis by the California Teachers Association, the statewide union, estimated that the district’s failure to meet the 55% spending mark diverted roughly $116 million away from classroom instruction over that period.

Union officials labeled the pattern a “skim scam,” arguing that administrators used the waivers to legally shift money out of classrooms while still claiming to be underfunded.

“Skim scams like this hurt students and keep classrooms from being fully resourced,” Ward said in a statement earlier this year, adding that repeated waivers undermined the intent of California’s Local Control Funding Formula, which directs extra money to high-need students.

District officials dispute that characterization. They say the 55% rule is a broad accounting requirement, not a minimum salary guarantee, and that the waivers were legally approved based on the district’s overall financial circumstances. They also contend that Twin Rivers’ teacher salaries are competitive with similar districts, even as they acknowledge the difficulty of recruiting educators statewide.

Charter fraud case fuels broader mistrust

The fight over waivers is not the only source of mistrust.

In 2025, a state audit found that Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools, a charter network located within Twin Rivers’ boundaries, improperly received more than $180 million in public funds it was not entitled to. The audit cited misreported student attendance and ineligible programs, and concluded that the charter’s poor performance was severe enough to drag down California’s overall high school graduation rate.

Educators in Twin Rivers had raised concerns about Highlands for years, appearing at board meetings and speaking to reporters. Their complaints helped spur a 10-part television investigation into charter oversight in the region and ultimately the state review.

For many teachers, the Highlands case became proof that large sums of money could be misplaced or mismanaged in the district’s orbit — even as their own classrooms struggled with shortages of staff and supplies.

A decade earlier, a Sacramento County grand jury issued a report on Twin Rivers titled “Lack of Trust + Lost Opportunities = Children’s Loss,” criticizing district leadership and describing deep community distrust after a series of governance disputes.

Schools stayed open during the walkout

While teachers carried picket signs in early March, the district kept all 49 school sites open, insisting students who showed up would be safe, supervised and fed. On the first day of the strike, Twin Rivers reported that more than 2,200 staff — including administrators, substitutes, classified employees and contracted workers — reported to work, an 88% staffing rate. The district reported serving more than 16,000 meals and said about 72% of students attended.

Some parents welcomed the decision to keep doors open, saying they depended on schools for child care and nutrition. Others kept their children home in solidarity or out of concern over what instruction, if any, was occurring.

Several parents told local media that their children spent time in gyms or multipurpose rooms, watching movies or completing worksheets under the supervision of substitutes or hourly staff. “Kids are not learning during Twin Rivers strike,” one parent said in a widely shared TV segment.

To maintain staffing, the district offered high daily rates to substitutes willing to work during the strike — as much as $600 a day, according to online job postings and substitute accounts. That fueled resentment among some permanent teachers, who noted that the strike-breaking pay exceeded what many of them earned on a per-day basis.

The district also faced scrutiny over images used in some of its digital communications to families during the strike. Social media users alleged that photos of smiling students in classrooms appeared to be artificially generated. A local television reporter who reviewed the images reported that while some looked like they could have been created by artificial intelligence, metadata the district provided indicated conventional photo files. The district did not publicly concede using AI imagery. Regardless, the episode amplified teachers’ criticism that district messaging painted too rosy a picture of conditions inside schools.

Tensions spilled into public view at a March 10 school board meeting at McClellan Park, where hundreds of educators, parents and students filled the room. Speakers described overstuffed classes, the strain of paying for family health care and the challenges they said students face without consistent, credentialed teachers. District leaders listened and reiterated their arguments about fiscal responsibility. The meeting was described by attendees and local news outlets as emotional and often heated.

A tentative agreement — and unresolved questions

As the Twin Rivers strike moved into its second week, teachers in neighboring Natomas Unified launched their own first-ever strike over similar issues of compensation, health care and class size. Educators from the two districts walked each other’s picket lines in a show of regional solidarity.

Natomas reached a tentative agreement first, returning its teachers to classrooms. That left Twin Rivers, for several days, as the lone Sacramento-area district still in a full strike.

On March 23, Twin Rivers teachers went back to work under a tentative agreement between the district and TRUE. The full contract has not yet been publicly released or formally approved by the school board, but union summaries and comments from teachers describe a package that goes beyond what the fact-finder recommended.

According to those accounts, the deal adds an additional 3% raise on top of the earlier 4.71% salary increase, along with a one-time $4,000 payment to educators. It also extends 100% district-paid Kaiser family medical coverage and increases the district’s contribution that employees can apply to other health plans.

On class size, the tentative agreement reportedly includes enforceable caps backed by a $300 per-student, per-month payment from the district for each student over the limit. Supporters say that financial penalty is designed to pressure the district to hire enough staff rather than routinely overfill rooms.

Details could still shift before a final contract is ratified by union members and approved by the school board. Twin Rivers officials have not publicly released their own summary of the agreement’s terms. In statements after the strike ended, the district continued to stress that it must balance fair compensation with long-term solvency.

For now, students are back in classrooms, and the picket signs have been set aside. But the issues that drove Twin Rivers into its first strike — how to fund schools serving some of California’s neediest children, who decides where education dollars go and how communities judge whether to trust those decisions — remain far from settled.