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The radical president of Los Angeles’ teachers union, who once said ‘there is no such thing as learning loss’ and attended an NBA game in a suite after announcing a solidarity strike, is among those in support of the LA schools’ strikes.
Staff at Los Angeles’s only public school district braved the rain to make good on their threats of a three-day strike Tuesday in hopes of obtaining better wages, shutting down the nation’s second-largest school system in the process.
Educators and employees have been slammed on social media for failing families, saying they are using nearly 500,000 young people as ‘leverage’ in their own battle for better pay and other benefits.
SEIU99 Executive Director Max Arias has led the support staff union into the strike and has insisted that the strike was the ‘workers’ last resort’, arrived at only after nearly a year of bargaining for better wages.
His union has been supported in a ‘solidarity strike’ by United Teachers Los Angeles and their union President Cecily Myart-Cruz, someone who has courted controversy in the past for her views on lockdowns and social justice.
Ahead of her election as president, Myart-Cruz spoke at the convention for the left-wing political group Democratic Socialists of America’s 2019 convention in Atlanta, in which she stated ‘I see teaching as a revolutionary act, just the way I see organizing.’
Cecily Myart-Cruz (pictured speaking at the Democratic Socialists of America Convention in 2019), the radical president of Los Angeles’ teachers union, who once said ‘there is no such thing as learning loss’ and allegedly attended an NBA game in a suite after announcing a solidarity strike, is among those in support of the LA schools’ strikes
‘It’s hard, it’s messy and sometimes it can be too much but you can never allow fear to win. We must engage folks to take action in different ways and we must work to make every work site an anti-racist one.’
She’s seen elsewhere in the speech criticizing the ‘neoliberal’ Los Angeles Unified School District which she argues ‘starved our schools’ and claimed that bosses is all walks of life ‘prey on fear.’
Her union bio also shows her as a member of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, the 2020 rallies of which she used to suggest there is ‘no such thing as learning loss’ for children who were not in school during the COVID-19 pandemic.
‘Our kids didn’t lose anything,’ she told LA Magazine in 2021. ‘It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.’
Her other remarks included ‘reopening schools without a broader improvement of schools will be unsafe and will deepen racial and class inequalities’ and ‘You can recall the Governor, you can recall the school board. But how are you going to recall me?’
Myart-Cruz won re-election in 2023 on a platform that included requests for schools to take pieces of a ‘Green New Deal’ into their district.
Their demands included expansion of outdoor education space, tech education in green energy fields, solar panels on all district buildings, increased electric school buses and extending free public transportation for students.
She also led the union while it planned to vote on joining the ‘Boycott, Divest and Sanction’ movement against Israel. The vote was eventually shut down after heavy criticism.
This map shows the schools throughout the Los Angeles area closed during the strike
SEIU99 Executive Director Max Arias has led the support staff union into the strike and has insisted that the strike was the ‘ workers’ last resort’, arrived at only after nearly a year of bargaining for better wages
Myart-Cruz won re-election in 2023 on a platform that included requests for schools to take pieces of a ‘Green New Deal’ into their district
The teachers’ union demands included expansion of outdoor education space, tech education in green energy fields, solar panels on all district buildings, increased electric school buses and extending free public transportation for students
Before becoming the head of the teacher’s union, Myart-Cruz attended Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, then Mount Saint Mary’s, a Catholic women’s college in Brentwood. She graduated in 1995, and on to Pepperdine to gain her teaching certificate – where fees now stand at $80,000-a-year.
She started her teaching career in Compton then went to an elementary school Westwood where kids first thought she was too strict but ended up ‘loving her’, according to a teacher who taught next door.
She is now divorced from her husband of 16 years and the pair share a ten-year-old son.
Now, she is dating VanCedric Williams, an elected member of the Oakland Unified School Board, according to the Los Angeles Magazine article.
The pair attended an NBA game between the Los Angeles Clippers and Golden State Warriors with Assemblyman Matt Haney from a box suite just after declaring the solidarity strike.
Myart-Cruz (pictured far left) attended an NBA game between the Los Angeles Clippers and Golden State Warriors with Assemblyman Matt Haney from a box suite just after declaring the solidarity strike
The unions have received backing of the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America
She then went to teach at Mesa Elementary in Crenwshaw, where students and their families were less affluent. She didn’t last long there, according to former colleagues.
In 2020, the former head of the union – Alex Caputo Pearl – reached his term limit, he endorsed her to take over.
She stopped teaching 2014 to devote herself to the union full time and was part of the leadership team when dues were increased from $689-a-year to $917 in 2016.
She took over in February 2020 – a month before the pandemic closed schools all over America and the world.
There are 33,000 teachers in the union but only 5,000 voted in the election where she became president with 69 percent of the vote – about 3,500 votes.
Myart-Cruz has been part of efforts to lead social and racial justice movements among union members
Students and community members marched from the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex to LAUSD headquarters at a 2020 rally
Hundreds of students and community members calling for the elimination of the $70 million Los Angeles School Police Department
Earlier this year, she blamed ‘white wealthy parents’ for wanting to get kids back into classrooms, saying: ‘Unfortunately, the plan reverts to deeply flawed ideas in Gavin Newsom’s proposal in December to offer school districts more money if they open faster.
‘If you condition funding on the reopening of schools, that money will only go to white and wealthier schools that do not have the transmission rates that low income black and brown communities do.’
The Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America – who Myart-Cruz spoke at the convention of in 2019 – has also heavily backed and worked with the unions.
The left-wing group has already held a ‘Tacos for Teachers’ event on Tuesday, while also holding several days of phone banking efforts to campaign for the unions.
Their social media feeds have been full of DSA-LA members marching the picket lines with the union members.
Most notably, Myart-Cruz has fought Gavin Newsom on his plan to reopen schools. She said that it was racist towards communities where COVID-19 was more rampant and those were typically minority or lower income communities
School workers from the Service Employees International Union Local 99 picket in West LA
They began a three day strike shutting down schools on Tuesday
School workers from the Service Employees International Union Local 99 outside of the Daniel Webster Middle School
As for SEIU99 Executive Director Max Arias, he promoted a march to Defund the Police and re-invest in schools in 2020.
At a rally on Monday, Arias led picketers in a chant of ‘no justice, no peace’ and said that their campaign was about justice.
‘It’s about 65,000 education workers telling the district what it needs to do to improve the conditions of schools to ensure that every student can succeed and do what they wish in life. Listen to the voices of the people that do the work.’
He finished saying the only thing that could stop their work was ‘justice’ before leading the chant.
The native of El Salvador notably has a plaque in his office stating ‘it’s on, motherf**kers!’ according to the LA Times.
He proudly boasted of his membership: ‘Once you learn you have power, it’s not easy to take it away. They’ve shut the district down!’
Now, more than 1,000 public schools are closed, and processions consisting of some 30,000 non-teaching support workers and 35,000 teachers are sprouting up across the city.
The campaign for increased pay to compensate for rampant inflation and housing costs saw thousands traversing the dark, rainy morning as early as 5:00 am Tuesday to march rain ponchos and jackets.
Union members behind the strike argue that the school support staffers – such as janitors, bus drivers, and lunch workers – on average, earn just $25,000 per year, forced to live in poverty in high-priced LA. The average annual rate of pay for a cashier at Burger King, for reference, is roughly $27,000, according to Glassdoor.
Taking to the streets Monday, workers affixed signs to their umbrellas while others offered pro-union chants in the storm of protests, which had been anticipated for weeks – and come as a somewhat unfavorable outcome for the district, as well as roughly a million parents, with more than 500,000 students now set to miss school.
Maryam Qudrat has accused United Teachers Los Angeles of racial profiling her after they blamed ‘white wealthy parents’ for the rush to get back in classrooms
It came after Myart-Cruz, head of UTLA, slammed a reopening plan, arguing it was being driven largely by ‘white wealthy parents’.
Members of Service Employees International Union Local 99 were among those marching in the cold rain Tuesday, toting signs with messages that decried the district for not adhering to their demands – which include a 30 percent pay raise.
‘We’ve had enough of empty promises,’ Arias told the outlet, flanked by school staffers and supporters of their demands. ‘If LAUSD truly values and is serious about reaching an agreement, they must show workers the respect they deserve.’
While citizens are fed up, public school workers in the embattled state – which is currently mulling over a proposal that would see roughly 1.8million black Californians gifted $360,000 in ‘reparations’ – are equally tired with the local government, leading to the planned walkouts that were announced last week.
‘Workers are fed-up with living on poverty wages and having their jobs threatened for demanding equitable pay,’ Arais said in a statement last week criticizing district for not bowing to their demands of an immediate wage increase.
‘Workers are fed-up with the short staffing at LAUSD – and being harassed for speaking up.’
Myart-Cruz led a March 2021 protest against California Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to reopen schools
Myart-Cruz said the union’s members would not accept a rushed return to the classroom
On Wednesday, Superintendent Carvahlo decried the possibility of a strike, especially after the prolonged campus closures that interrupted students’ learning during the pandemic.
‘What are the consequences?’ Carvalho said of the possible repercussions of yet another week of closures. ‘The consequences are once again learning loss, deprivation of safety and security that schools provide to our kids, deprivation of food and nutrition that many of our kids depend on.’
He added: ‘I know that we focus our attention on the needs of the workforce. I need to focus my attention also primarily on the needs of our kids.’
Parents are now expressing similar concerns as only one school day remains before the prospective walkouts, with a solution still yet to be reached and school workers still set to picket.
Local mother Yesenia Benites complained the closures will not only affect her young daughter, but her as well, as she divides her time between parenting and taking online classes at an undergrad university.
‘Since I do go to college and take online classes, having to have a daughter that’s here… it’s gonna take my study time to do homework and all that.’
That said, the mom said she was most concerned about her daughter.
‘She’s going to miss being with her friends and learning,’ she lamented.
Meanwhile, workers look set to strike. According to Union officials, district staffers currently earn an average salary of just $25,000. Los Angeles currently boasts one of the highest average rents in the country, at roughly $2,600.
