Teachers and classified employees, of the Sacramento City Teachers Association and the Service Employees International Union, began their strike on March 23, but the SEIU said they have been bargaining with the district since October.
"We have instructional aides who are being left alone with whole classrooms full of kids, which that's not what they're supposed to do, they're supposed to work one on one with special needs kids," Smith-Camejo said. She said they are having to write curricula when they aren't certificated teachers, and that isn't their job.
"Some students, like at John F. Kennedy High School on certain days, they would pack 13 classes into an auditorium because they didn't even have substitute teachers, let alone regular teachers," a spokesperson for the SCTA, Jamie Horwitz, told ABC News in an interview.
The district said it has taken"meaningful steps" since 2017 to address understaffing and said its COVID proposals would have addressed these issues. "The district's narrative has been that they have financial problems and historically, they did, if you went back like a dozen years. But [now] primarily, they have really bad accounting," Horwitz said.
While the district on Saturday offered the SEIU a 2% pay increase for workers, Smith-Camejo said this is"really unacceptable."