After two students at Northridge Middle School brought guns onto campus a few weeks ago, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) organized a picket for educators and families to participate.
“The district continues to fail to provide true systems of behavior support for educators and students,” said Wendy Lucia Lozano, Valley West UTLA Area Chair and fourth grade teacher at Canoga Park Elementary. “It’s a lot of performative things there are doing. They’re not enforcing their own PBIS (Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports) plans, where they’re supposed to be providing more support for educators and teachers.”
The picket organized by UTLA took place on May 16 in front of the district’s Region North offices on Balboa Boulevard next to Daniel Pearl Magnet High School. Educators at the protest said that issues of campus safety have escalated with incidents involving drug usage and gang activity in schools such as Franklin High School and Panorama High School. Most recently, Northridge Middle School had two students bring guns onto campus, which further raised these preexisting concerns about the safety of students and staff on school campuses, according to educators picketing.
“My biggest concern is that I didn’t hear about this incident until the union told me,” said Nancy Brody, a second grade teacher at Limerick Elementary Canoga Park. “I don’t know why my district didn’t tell me that there was an incident where peoples’ lives were at stake and they didn’t feel the need to share that.”
“Officers entered campus on May 3 to arrest two students carrying loaded semiautomatic handguns around school,” according to the article ‘LAUSD police deployment to 20 schools collapses after one day amid opposition, confusion,’ in the Los Angeles Times. After being discovered with the guns, they were arrested and the school sent a message to the families of the school vowing to provide patrols and on-campus policemen.
Parents, teachers and staff of the Los Angeles Unified School District are upset because “After confirming the reports, the district neglected to implement a full lockdown, did not clearly communicate updates and protocol out to staff as rumors spread across campus, and continued with student testing throughout the day. Days later, the district held a closed-door meeting for parents and explicitly barred all teachers, faculty, and staff from attending,” according to the UTLA article ‘Northridge Middle School: Holding LAUSD accountable for safety’ by UTLA (United Teachers of Los Angeles).’
“No student, no teacher and no parent should ever have to feel that going to a school is going to cost them their lives,” said Ivania Ortiz, a sixth grade special education teacher at Northridge Middle School. “That shouldn’t be a thing we ever normalize.”
