Beverly Hills Unified School District teachers went on strike in 1989 over salary and benefits.

Nearly 30 years later, a procession of teachers during public comment at the school board’s Aug. 28 meeting evoked memories of that strike with their own pleas for higher salaries and better benefits. The district and Beverly Hills Education Association, which represents teachers, are at an impasse in negotiations.

The district and union will now undertake a fact-finding process after a few months of mediation by the State Mediation and Conciliation Service did not produce a deal. Factors such as the cost of living and wages in Beverly Hills Unified compared to other districts will be under review.

Alexis Crane, a science, technology, engineering and math professor at Hawthorne School, said she spends 12 percent of her income on her 10-month-old daughter’s health care. She said she’s been embraced by the Beverly Hills community, even though she lives in another city.

“This is my community and I love it,” Crane said. “Please help educators keep our schools great.”

Reading a statement on behalf of BHEA President Telly Tse, Beverly Hills High School math and science teacher Marla Weiss called for the two sides to resume a “fair, reasonable and collaborative conversation.”

“It is not too late for us to come together and resolve this in a positive manner,” Weiss said.

District officials have said declining enrollment has caused an overstaffing of teachers, which has limited their compensation relative to teachers in neighboring districts.

“When we fix that, and it’s going to have to be fixed, our upside down budget will be right,” school board member Mel Spitz said. “We will give funds to do what we all want to do for our teachers.”

An effort last spring to reconfigure the district’s four K-8 schools into one 6-8 middle school and three K-5 schools in the coming years was undertaken in part to rectify the district’s overstaffing. But it stalled after opposition from parents and concerns from school board members.

School board President Lisa Korbatov said the current salary formula, which was approved in 2014 and ties teacher salary increases to property taxes, was supposed to reduce the friction between the district and union. But in retrospect, she said she thinks it disrupted the “normal rhythm of negotiation” and deepened the divide between the two sides.

“Coming here and all these times screaming at us, to say disconcerting is to put it mildly,” she said.

In a statement at the start of negotiations, the district said that property tax revenue growth has been largely devoted to salary increases for teachers.

“This leaves very little remaining property tax revenue growth, which the district relies upon to cover increased costs in retirement benefits, inflation on materials and services, funding new projects and growing much needed reserves,” the statement read.

The financial standing of the district has been one of the points of contention. Spitz has emphasized the projected deficits in the adopted budgets the board has approved over the years, while school board member Howard Goldstein likes to stress that the audited actuals, which verify the expenditures and revenues, have never shown deficit spending.

In a letter to the board on Aug. 21, the Los Angeles County Office of Education approved the district’s 2018-19 budget but also warned about projected deficit spending and the potential for salary increases to raise expenditures.

Beverly Hills will elect two new school board members in this November’s election, the first since the board switched to elections on even-numbered years to comply with new state law. Goldstein and Korbatov are stepping down.