Progress, slowly but surely

June 2009 - May 15, the day of UTLA's civil disobedience, I was no longer UTLA President A.J. Duffy-I became Prisoner Number 10. Along with two other UTLA officers-Joshua Pechthalt and Betty Forrester-and 36 other UTLA members, we took a defiant stand that day, and we were willing to be arrested to dramatize what's at stake if LAUSD refuses to stop the class-size increases and the layoffs of thousands of employees.

In doing so, we were standing with tens of thousands of teachers, health and human services professionals, parents, students, and community members who aren't taking the cuts lying down. In the four months since the layoffs and class-size increases were announced, literally hundreds of protests, rallies, town hall meetings, and other actions have taken place. They've come in all shapes and sizes, from impromptu confrontations of visiting Board members at schools to studentled sit-ins and the ongoing hunger strike, organized by a dedicated band of members who are fighting for their schools. Only dramatic means will communicate the dramatic damage that will be done to our schools if the layoffs go through and class sizes go up.

And together, we are getting results: 3,500 jobs saved since March. Did LAUSD do that out of the goodness of their hearts? Of course not. They did it because the voices of tens of thousands can't be denied.

Unnecessary chaos

We know there's a severe fiscal crisis in California, in the U.S., in the world, but L.A. schools could have been insulated from its effects this year. If LAUSD has used the stimulus money properly, all jobs could have been saved. Class size is the key to school reform, and if the stimulus money had been used centrally to hire class-size reduction teachers, no teacher or counselor would have lost his or her job and class-size increases would have been averted for 2009-10. Yes, we know that 2010-11 and 2011-12 might have been more problematic, but the stimulus package was created to save jobs now.

Instead, District officials were intent on sending the money to school sites for each to decide how to use it. On paper, the idea sounds good (UTLA has been pushing for more local control for years), but in reality, schools were not given enough time or training to make these key decisions. And into that void stepped administrators and local district officials, who strong-armed School Site Councils into making the funding choices they wanted-not what's best for the school. Superintendent Cortines, for his part, refused to make it clear to his administrators that he wanted a fair, open, honest discussion without bullying or coercion.

And the damage has been done: Figures obtained by UTLA show that schools have hired back more than 1,000 nonclassroom positions, and in elementary schools more out-of-classroom positions (a total of 673.5) were funded than classroom teachers (636). The decision will trigger larger class sizes and staffing chaos at hundreds of schools as teachers are either let go or forced to move to another school. It will also result in stark inequities across LAUSD: In the same neighborhood, one school could have 2008-09 class-size levels, while students at a nearby site face big increases. (UTLA is talking with the ACLU, NAACP, and MALDEF about these equity issues.)

It's no wonder that UTLA has been flooded with complaints about the process. Already we've filed more than 20 Uniform Complaints about how the funding decisions were made at some sites. Schools report that administrators intimidated School Site Councils, ignored the council's decisions, or completely locked the council out of the process. That's not local control- that's local repression.

Even with all that, we still want to find a way to work with LAUSD. They have made some cuts to the bureaucracy, but we know there is more to cut. The mini-districts are a luxury we can no longer afford. We've asked to see the leases for non-LAUSD-owned spaces and how much they spend on outside law firms. And it's not just the fat that needs to be cut, but the bureaucratic mentality that lets it flourish. How can we guarantee that what is cut today won't be back tomorrow?

If we succeed in making serious, lasting cuts to the bureaucracy, we will be moving closer to the system we dream of, where LAUSD central is simply a conduit to send resources to school sites, not a command-andcontrol overlord.

Heating up the summer

Where do we go from here? We keep pressing on, we keep fighting until our schools are whole again. We will work all summer long with teachers, parents, and students to stop the cuts.

As our fight heads into its fifth month, weariness can threaten to settle it-but we can't let it. Take a look at the box on page 2. See the jobs we've saved. Know that what you do now-what you commit yourself to fight for-has real, lasting consequences. You are saving jobs, saving families, saving our students' future.