About 200 protesters gathered near downtown Tuesday to link the nationwide Occupy Wall Street-inspired protests to budgets cuts and layoffs in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
“Occupy LAUSD” participants took on the district, education philanthropists and charter schools as well as giving voice to familiar themes such as opposing corporate greed and inequality. Many of the demonstrators had marched from the main Occupy L.A. campsite around City Hall, more than a mile away.
English teacher Greta Enszer spoke at the school board meeting going on inside district headquarters and then addressed the crowd outside in similar terms.
“This is not OK to lay off permanent teachers,” she told the school board. “This [job] is not a stepping stone to me. This is my profession. My students are very important to me.”
Enszer is working as a long-term substitute teacher at her former school, West Adams Preparatory High School, while she hopes to be hired back.
Outside the Beaudry Avenue building, just west of downtown, adult education teacher Matthew Kogan criticized a status quo in which, he said, rich philanthropists such as Eli Broad and Bill Gates have more power than parents with children in schools. The name of each philanthropist elicited boos.
Independently operated charter schools, most of which are non-union, also took a pummeling.
The demonstration was not sanctioned by the teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, but it included scores of teachers. Many accused L.A. Unified of holding onto funds that could be used to hire back laid off teachers.
L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy blamed UTLA for the protest.
“I wish UTLA could shift its energy from protest as the norm to negotiation for reform,” he said in a statement. He also objected to linking the leadership of L.A. Unified with Wall Street.
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