Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Lightning makes no sound until it strikes.” With hundreds of thousands of people all over the world standing up for what they believe in, this is truer than ever. It is our civil right to be able to believe whatever we want and be able to stand up against the injustices and adversity we face, especially in the job field. To get their points across, many jobs turn to the option of striking.
A strike is a refusal to work organized by a body of employees as a form of protest, typically in an attempt to gain a concession or concessions from their employer, or so it is said by Google. And very recently, a strong whip of red will be lashing across the LAUSD school district. This powerful blow will be given by the teachers of UTLA, who started striking on Monday, January 14th, 2019.
Which leads us to the grand question: Why are the teachers of L.A striking? There are many reasons but some of the most important ones are smaller class sizes, an increase in salary(pay), and more counselors and nurses distributed among LAUSD schools to stay full time.
For years, teachers have been trying to gain these requests without striking. But now, these problems have gone into levels that are extreme. According to an interview conducted by the Guardian, classes can easily reach sizes of 30 to 40 kids where in comparison the average class size is about 24 kids. That’s drastically overpopulated! This affects teachers as well as the students. Not only does this make it harder to teach such an extensive number of students but the students will not learn as well opposed to a classroom that has the right number. On the other hand, some schools may be under-enrolled which means that these class caps cannot be met. This opens doors to charter schools to piggyback onto other schools campuses. For the school, this would mean money being scarcer due to lower attendance, charter schools using the previous school’s facilities, and also slowly taking away classrooms from the host school.
Teachers are also requesting full-time nurses for every school. There have been many incidents when students have gotten injured and or are sick and there is no nurse to treat them. Students deserve a nurse 24/7, not 3/3. Counselors are also on this list. Counselors help thousands of kids every day with many problems and support them through hard times. These kids should be able to talk through these issues whenever they want and be able to rely on a counselor to talk to.
This walkout proved to be effective. On Tuesday, January 22nd, the teachers’ strike came to a close after 6 full school days of an estimated 30,000 teachers standing in the rain, fighting for what they believe in. Sure enough, the deal reached satisfied all these needs. Our schools class sizes will be declining gradually over the next few years. In English and math classes, there will be strict 39 student class cap. The teachers were given a 6% raise that will be slowly introduced over the course of the next year. And finally, full-time nurses will be given to every school and counselors will be given per every 500 kids at a school. The UTLA teachers voted later the same day and agreed to this deal.
If this strike has shown the world anything, it’s that if we come together as one, anything can be accomplished. We should all be able to believe what we want and fight peacefully for equality within our workplaces. This is where that MLK Jr. quote really rings with truth. “Lightning makes no sound until it strikes.” And we must all be ready for when this lightning strikes because when it does, it will sure change our country forever.
Makena Ramirez, 2024- GALA News Writer
Photo Credit: NEA Today
A reverberation of GALA student voices 