Day 1- Strike

 The last teacher strike in Los Angeles was in 1989.  Twenty years later, 34,000 educators went on strike.  As a veteran teacher, this was not something that I necessarily wanted but something I had to do.  This was a post I wrote the eve before the strike:

Tomorrow I will go on strike. I will be picketing in the rain with my husband and sons, 20 colleagues from my school site, and 30,000 more teachers from the district. This is not what I hoped would happen, but what has to happen. 

- I am striking to make a difference in the lives of all students. 
- I am striking for students who do not have the educational environment and support systems they need. 
- I am striking for the thousands of students who are sitting in overcrowded classrooms who don’t have desks and sit on the floor or lean on a wall. 
- I am striking for the 80% of the district’s students who live at or near the poverty line and have a right to librarians, nurses, counselors, and psychologists more than one day a week. 
- I am striking in the hopes that we do not break the district into “32 networks” so the haves keep having and the have-nots are left with nothing. I do not want Los Angeles to be the next New Orleans where there are no more neighborhood schools. 

I am not striking against schools but FOR schools. It’s not a cliche, teachers teach because they want to make a difference. And tomorrow, teachers will strike to make a difference.