Occupy LAUSD Aligns With Local Occupy Movement, Will March Today
A group of Los Angeles Unified School District teachers, parents, students, and other district employees will march with the Occupy L.A. protesters this afternoon. The groups will leave the Occupy L.A. site at City Hall at 4 p.m. and head to the LAUSD headquarters on Beaudry for a rally and press conference. Some will set up tents on the sidewalk outside the building to "occupy" the area in protest of education cuts.
Occupy LAUSD says they are part of the 99%, too, and that cuts have caused not only tremendous teacher and school employee layoffs, but also the closing of libraries, and the overcrowding of classrooms. "This smacks of a deliberate effort to defund our schools, label them failures, and then privatize them," says Occupy LAUSD.
The movement is linking the efforts of wealthy local businesses and individuals with current problems, not solutions, in the district:
The LAUSD School Board’s top-down privatization reform efforts have given away public schools to Corporate Charter School management companies, reconstituted schools, closed down Adult Ed. programs, and increased the reliance on high states testing that has narrowed the curriculum. All these so-called “reforms” are driven by multi millionaires Eli Board, the Gates foundation and others, the 1%, who control education policy in Los Angeles.
The group lays out their "central message" as follows:
1. Lower Class sizes, hire back our teachers, counselors, nurses, office workers and all others who make our school communities great.
2. Stop the war on public education. We demand full funding of our schools, an end to layoffs that disrupt our school communities and tax justice for schools and social services.
3. We want to keep Public Schools, PUBLIC! End corporate driven reforms on our schools. End corporate influence of the 1%, Eli Board, Gates etc. on our schools!
