By Sikivu Hutchinson
When the pro-charter LAUSD school board majority appointed
investment banker Austin Beutner to superintendent earlier this year it effectively
declared war on schools of color and communities of color. Nationwide, public schools have been gutted
by the rising tide of charterization, privatization, high stakes testing, union-busting,
civil rights rollbacks engineered by the Trump/DeVos Department of Education. Teacher
walkouts have reverberated across the country as states
slash public education funding and schools re-segregate to pre-Brown v. Board
levels. The cynical appointment of the
grossly underqualified Beutner (a one percenter white male with no prior public
school teaching or administrative experience) signified that the board was essentially
handing over the District to these forces on a silver platter in a swaggering
f-you to parents, teachers, and students who’ve seen their schools reduced to
detention centers.
When I attended Hamilton High School in the LAUSD in the
eighties there were no school police, random searches or metal detectors. College preparation was largely the domain of
middle-class kids who could afford expensive Kaplan SAT test prep classes, and “guidance”
counselors routinely advised students of color to go to vocational school or try
their luck finding a low wage job “if” they graduated. Flash forward and I’m the parent of a child
who attends one of the last predominantly Black magnet elementary schools in a district
that has morphed into a bloated police state bureaucracy. With a dedicated police presence at virtually
every campus of color, the district is a national leader in school
paramilitarization. In this Orwellian LAUSD, lorded over by pro-charter privatizer
shills and developers, students of color must navigate searches by deans, patrolling
by police, and campus aides. Black, Latinx and Indigenous students in
overpoliced schools struggle to gain access to college preparation opportunities
and classes that reflect their social histories, while full-time college
counselors, social workers, nurses and other resource providers are a luxury
for affluent white schools.
In resistance to these blatant inequities, the UTLA is
holding a massive demonstration downtown at Grand Park this Saturday at 10 a.m. The event
is a clarion call to save public education from the privatization regime espoused
by Beutner and his billionaire allies from the Broad and Walton
Foundations. The rally is expected to draw
thousands and is being supported by ally unions like the SEIU. On the brink of a potential strike in early January,
UTLA has been locked in a battle with the district over teacher salaries, class
sizes, and funding for counselors, librarians, nurses and community schools. Although the district is reportedly sitting on a 1.86
billion dollar reserve, it is still playing hardball with the union, stalling
on negotiations and ramping up rhetoric about teacher greed (the district is
offering teachers a 6% salary increase, up from 3%, but has tied it to increased
class sizes, reduced healthcare coverage for new employees, and mandatory
professional development hours, conditions that would undermine instructional
time, student success, and teacher morale). According to UTLA: “The state requires only a 1% reserve, yet LAUSD has
26.5% in reserves. We have not been shown why it is so high, nor why district
officials continue to ignore requests for financial information, the basis for
why they say UTLA’s bargaining proposals are unreasonable.”
And as the district fiddles while schools of color burn, it has slashed funding
for arts, music and STEM education, imposing
testing that’s not even required by the state or federal government to the
tune of $8.6 million a year.
In October, youth from the student-community activist organization
Students Deserve confronted
Beutner in a Westside mansion at a cozy invitation-only dinner on the “state of
public education”. Beutner was caught on camera scuttling away from the hard questions Dorsey
High students Saisha Smith and Marshe Doss posed about the district’s
refusal
to end random searches. Indeed, Beutner—who
is the CEO of a district with over 15,000 homeless youth—has
shown himself to be overly adept at doing overtime on district business at expensive dinners, lunches and other toney retreats
far removed from his constituents in the “ghetto”.
The school board’s reckless disregard for communities
of color is especially destructive for queer and LGBTQI students who are being
silenced and/or pushed out of schools in disproportionate numbers. In a recent survey on LGBTQI climate issues that
my students conducted at their South L.A. high school, the majority of students
reported hearing homophobic remarks and could not identify administrators that
were openly supportive of LGBTQI students on campus. Similarly, the African American young women
that I work with through the Women’s
Leadership Project (WLP) say they don’t feel safe on their campuses and
classrooms due to chronic sexual harassment.
Nonetheless, consistent programs that deal specifically with prevention education,
mental health, and trauma for
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| WLP's "An Average Day in a Black Girl Student's Life" |
girls of color are lacking in the district. These
issues are at the heart of UTLA’s battle with the district. While Beutner and his lapdog school board are
hellbent on breaking
up the district into 32 mini-districts (a tactic that is already represented
by the moribund local district model) the parents, students and teachers who will
be joining UTLA’s resistance recognize how high the stakes are and are prepared
to go the distance.
Expressing her support for the march, WLP student Nigia
Vannetty said, “As a student this march means a lot to me because of my
experiences at Gardena High School. The ‘random’ searches conducted at my
school are unfair and unjust. These random searches do more harm than good like
disrupting class time and causing a huge scene for students. I have fallen victim
to random searches and the feeling it gives you when you’re called is a mixture
of fright and embarrassment. It’s even worse for girls who are on their time of
the month and for their feminine products to be spewed all over the ground for
the girl, boys, and staff to see. Overall, random searches are a humiliating
experience that shouldn’t be implemented at schools at all. I hope that what I say
makes a difference to students, teachers, staff, and administrators.”
