Educators are wonderful, you are wonderful. Congratulations on completing another academic year. Every year that you finish, you have touched that many more lives, have shaped the future more indelibly, and have strengthened our profession for the long-term through your accomplishments.
I am asking you to pause your reading of the UNITED TEACHER for five minutes right now and sign up for three precinct-walking shifts in the School Board election campaign. Quite simply, if we all walk three shifts, we will win on May 16. Protecting our health benefits and winning a contract for the Schools LA Students Deserve depends on us electing Steve Zimmer and Imelda Padilla to the LAUSD School Board.
It was an inspiring scene in front of Arminta Street Elementary School in the East San Fernando Valley on March 16. I was marching and chanting with Arminta Street teacher Debbie Schneider-Solis, her co-workers, and a great group of Arminta parents to protest a potential Prop. 39 co-location by Celerity charter.
February 10 marked the one-year anniversary of the passage of the Build the Future, Fund the Fight (BFFF) initiative. Last year, I spent a lot of time in our BFFF phone-banking room, often with member stalwarts like Vince Fazzi, a health and human services leader. Calling our members, having great dialogues about the need for the dues increase, full merger, and Group Legal Services, in support of the strategic plan, seems like only yesterday.
As with every year, our priorities in 2017 will be driven by the school site and classrooms. January re-connections with two people I hadn’t spoken with for years — way too long — reinforced this for me.
You have reached winter break, and you deserve every moment of rest and rejuvenation that you will get. You are the backbone of our schools, our service to students, our communities, our union, and our profession. Enjoy this time.
I met Channing Martinez in 2001 when he walked into my Life Skills class as a ninth-grader at Crenshaw High School. He developed an interest in the history of social movements and efforts to address inequality ...
On October 6, I walked with the Gardner Elementary school community, knocking on doors to ask people what they would like to see in their neighborhood school and giving out information about Propositions 55 and 58.
Delivered at the Bonaventure Hotel on July 29, 2016, UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl delivers his annual 'State of the Union' speech that lays out the roadmap for the new school year.
Every summer has its wonderful and rejuvenating aspects — I hope that has been your experience over June and July. You deserve it. Yet, this has also been a summer of violence, a summer of shaking U.S. society to its core. We have arrived at an explosive intersection as a country.