A campaign that was coordinated by the LAUSD Human Relations Commission.

LA Unified has a Human Relations Commission, but it may be one of the district’s best-kept secrets.

Their meetings aren’t listed on any of the school district’s calendars; more than 40 percent of the meetings last year didn’t have a quorum; and the department overseeing it once had 31 employees but is now down to two.

“When you hear the anti-immigration rhetoric going on during this presidential campaign, and hear the legitimate fears that children and their families are expressing in the district, you know that the work of the commission is more important now than ever,” said Allan Kakassy, a retired high school teacher appointed to the commission by school board member George McKenna. “But there is hardly any outreach, and nobody really knows that it is going on.”

The Commission on Human Relations, Diversity & Equity, also known as the LAUSD Human Relations Commission, is made up of an appointee from each school board member as well as representatives from the major unions, the city and county human relations commissions, the Los Angeles County Office of Education, the Anti-Defamation League and other community representatives.

“Students and teachers are very concerned about bullying and there’s an element of that in the presidential campaign that seems to encourage it,” Kakassy said. “And there are so many ways to do it with social media. These are things we discuss at our meetings.”

Last year, the group discussed issues such as the renewed push to make ethnic studies an A-G requirement, all-gender restrooms, library books with more inclusive religious diversity and school safety issues.

“At every meeting we are discussing issues that are in the headlines right now, and we are trying to figure out how to help the district support the students with the greatest needs,” Kakassy said.

The ethnic studies issue is a passion project for LA Unified teacher and activist Jose Lara, who often attends the commission meetings and is working on implementing the classes in the district and throughout the state. Lara was disappointed that LA Unified disbanded the Ethnic Studies Committee last year, until he and the commission pushed for the meetings to resume this year in an effort to make the class an elective in the A-G curriculum. Meanwhile, Lara is working on getting ethnic studies added to the statewide curriculum as an elective in a bill now before Gov. Jerry Brown. The governor vetoed a similar bill last year that would have made it a requirement.

When it was created in 2005, the Office of Human Relations, Diversity & Equity that oversees the commission had a director, five specialists, one classified employee, 16 youth relations employees and eight student-to-student staff specialists. By 2008 all the positions had been eliminated except for two human relations specialists.

Judy Chiasson, director Human Relations, Diversity & Equity, said the commission will be introducing three new members at the next meeting Thursday. The group will also hear a presentation about social-emotional learning and how it is being used in the district.

The meeting will be held at 6 p.m. on Sept. 8 in the Blue Room next to the LA Unified School Board auditorium at 333 South Beaudry Ave. The meeting is open to the public.

Nolan Cabrera of the University of Arizona.

Anti-immigrant rhetoric going on in presidential politics and a potential state law have added a renewed emphasis on developing required ethnic studies classes in the LA Unified curriculum.

An expert from the University of Arizona spoke to an LA Unified school board committee this week to explain the importance of ethnic studies in education. He brought in some statistics to show the benefits.

“This is a very pressing educational issue,” assistant professor Nolan Cabrera told the Curriculum, Instruction and Educational Equity Committee on Tuesday. “We need to know how to get along across differences. People like to knock these courses like it’s an easy class, such as basket weaving, but it’s not.”

In Arizona, pilot schools targeted low-performing students and gave them Mexican-American studies courses. The schools saw that attendance, class scores and graduation rates all improved, Cabrera said. Attendance went up by 21 percent, grade point averages went up by 1.4 points and students added 23 credits to their curriculum, Cabrera said.

School board members Scott Schmerelson, Steve Zimmer and George McKenna at the meeting all expressed support for the ethnic studies courses.

“I’m am continued to be troubled about politics in this country,” said McKenna, the only African-American on the board. “People who are running are running anti the concept of ethnic inclusion, and anti ethnic contributions and they are being celebrated for it. Now they have someone espousing with all the bombast that some people should be kept over here and some kept over there, and I know how that feels like because I rode at back of bus for the first 25 years of my life.”

McKenna said that he hoped that the Ethnic Studies Task Force starts meeting again, and asked to district to support the programs.

Derrick Chau, the director of Secondary Instruction for the district, said they are now developing a strategic plan for implementing ethnic studies across the district and are revising three English language arts classes to align with ethniic studies. Chau said the district is planning professional development for teachers, too.

Chau pointed out that the ethnic breakdown among the roughly 650,000 students at LA Unified is now 74 percent Latino, 8.4 percent African-American and 6 percent Asian. He said, “I turn to my own children who are of Asian and Latino decent and I think how beneficial it would be for the children of LAUSD and my own children to have access to these courses.” 

Jose Lara of Ethnic Studies Now is fighting for the classes throughout the state and said seven districts have already taken the lead in making the courses a graduation requirement. The LA Unified school board voted to do that in 2014, but the plan became stalled because of potential costs in training teachers and an estimated $72 million for textbooks.

“Those are bogus arguments,” Lara told the LA School Report. “Teachers are doing these courses with online resources and there are amazing classes going on right now throughout the district already. It doesn’t require developing a whole new training. LAUSD has been in the lead of this, but the implementation is stuck in the weeds.”

Lara and Cabrera were actually both students at UCLA graduate school and started the Raza Graduate Student Association together to support Latino grad students. “We would talk about one day bringing ethnic studies into high schools and look at us now, in two different states doing the same type of work,” Lara said.

Next week, Lara said he has meetings with district officials about starting the Ethnic Studies Task Force meetings up again. The classes are now in 40 high schools as electives.

After Lara’s presentation at the last school board meeting, Sylmar High School principal James Lee asked to bring ethnic studies to his school, and he contacted six east San Fernando Valley high schools about doing the same thing.

“It looks like this will be required for our ninth graders eventually anyway, so why not start as soon as possible? It’s a great idea, and the other principals are very excited about being part of the pilot program launch,” Lee said. “Next, I am going to ask for teachers who are interested in teaching the classes.”

Lara said another impetus for LAUSD is a bill sponsored by state Assemblyman Luis Alejo, (D-Watsonville) requiring every school district and charter school have a high school required ethnic studies course beginning in the 2020-2021 school year. Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill very much like that last year because it created an advisory panel that duplicates the work of the state education department. Lara said the new bill will most likely pass.

The San Francisco and San Diego school districts have already started on the path to required ethnic studies, and Lara said he is doing a presentation next week in Fontana for all their schools.

“We need the commitment and funding to get this going in LAUSD finally,” Lara said. “It seems like there’s a momentum and willingness now to do it.”

Zimmer echoed Lara’s frustration and said, “Many of us are extremely impatient about our approach to the implementation.”

Students protest Tuesday outside LAUSD headquarters to get ethnic studies classes.

Although an ethnic studies mandate was approved by the school board in 2014, LA Unified is only now taking steps to fulfill their hope of getting ethnic studies into every high school.

But it won’t be a graduation requirement any time soon, and it won’t be a requirement for the class of 2019, as the school board voted on two years ago.

“The class of 2019 are freshmen in high school now, so it would be unfair to require them to take the classes now,” said Derrick Chau, director of secondary instruction at LA Unified who is coordinating the ethnic studies classes. “We are moving ahead with districtwide ethnic studies, but there is not a clear timeline.”

Outside the school board meeting Tuesday, about 300 students, parents and teachers circled the Beaudry headquarters with signs and shouting slogans to include ethnic studies in their curriculum.

“It is important for me to know more about my cultural background,” said 11th-grader Juliet Dominguez from Santee Education Complex near downtown. “There is a need for ethnic studies, because a majority of my classmates are unaware of how our culture fits in with history.”

Jose Lara, founder of the Ethnic Studies Now Coalition, spoke at Tuesday’s school board meeting along with Dominguez and a few other students to ask the district to honor their own resolution.

“When LAUSD approved this two years ago, it sent shock waves across the state, but the ball was dropped,” Lara said. “Students should learn about themselves and learn about your history and fill in the missing pages of our text books.”

Jose Lara after he spoke with his students to the school board.

Superintendent Michelle King then announced that in March the University of California Office of President approved a one-semester ethnic studies class that will fulfill a college-prep curriculum class. It will be available to all high school students by the fall.

“That’s a good mark forward,” said King. Then she added that by May 1 there will be on the district website a course outline of the class, and eventually there will be six other classes in the ethnic studies curriculum.

The classes will include studies on identity and focus on four historically marginalized groups in the United States: African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans. They will also include LGBT issues.

The board passed the resolution in October 2014, but in May 2015 then-Superintendent Ramon Cortines said he didn’t support making ethnic studies a graduation requirement. Cortines said such studies should be included in the curriculum in classes earlier than high school. He was also discouraged by the multimillion-dollar cost of expanding the ethnic studies program.

Chau said he is working toward creating courses such as African American History and Mexican American Literature so they can become another element of a coordinated ethnic studies program.

Already 40 of the 98 high schools in the district offer some kind of ethnic studies course as an elective, and Chau said that he hopes to expand it as an elective into middle schools. Along with the basic ethnic studies class, there are three history and social studies courses and three English language arts courses involving the studies.

Desiree Martinez, from Students for Education Reform, also spoke at the school board meeting and talked about being a Latina student at UCLA. “I began to feel discouraged and questioned why I was there,” she said. “I was disheartened that there were more Latinos in the custodial staff than in my classes.”

Students marching outside the school board headquarters.

She said a fully integrated ethnic studies class in high school would have given her the support she needed to get to higher education, and she believes that some of her fellow classmates in high school would have joined her in college if they had such a class. King’s plan to renew an emphasis on ethnic studies is a start, she said.

But Lara said King’s announcement is not enough. “We need the district to do more, they need to recommit to ethnic studies and take serious action now,” said Lara, who noted that UTLA is also supportive of ethnic studies programs as a requirement. “They were committed for one year, but what about year two, three and four?”

Lara said he met with most of the board members and they individually support the idea, but he said the ball was dropped after former board member Bennett Kayser was voted out of office last year.

“The Ethnic Studies Committee needs to be re-formed too,” Lara said.

Chau said he still consults with the members of the Ethnic Studies Committee, but said their proposals are in, and they pointed out the cost will be in the millions of dollars for retraining teachers and perhaps hiring more teachers.

“It will cost several million dollars just to get books for all our ninth-graders,” Chau said. “We have to be smart in how we roll this out, we have to have the instructional materials and the teachers trained.”

He is already starting professional development for teachers interested in teaching the classes. And by next fall the ethnic studies classes will be available at all high schools.

It will be up to individual school principals to decide if they want to bring it to their schools, Chau said.

At Tuesday’s demonstration, Sylmar High School Principal James Lee told the students on his way out of the meeting, “I was inspired by what you said up there. I will put this on the fast track at my school as soon as I can.”

Jose Lara, LA Unified teacher

As many as 200 parents, teachers and students are expected to attend a community forum, starting at 5 p.m. today at Santee High School, to provide input into the LAUSD superintendent search.

The meeting was scheduled to reach people that the organizers say weren’t included in the search firm’s recent compilation profile from surveys and other community meetings.

Many of those expected to attend are in a “forgotten” part of south Los Angeles, said the meeting’s organizer, activist Jose Lara, who is also a member of the LA teachers union board. He described the area as an unusual section of the city because it’s where students attend a school in board member Mónica García’s district but live in districts represented by Ref Rodriguez or Richard Vladovic.

“None of the input sessions have been held in this part of south LA, which is always ignored,” Lara said. “So we decided to host our own town hall.”

Staff members from Mónica Ratliff and Garcia’s offices plan to attend the meeting, gather the information and report the findings directly to the school board, which is hoping to hire a new superintendent before the end of the year.

“Mónica García has taken a special interest in this school and the input from this area because she used to teach within walking distance of the school,” Lara said.

Lara said he invited members of the search firm, Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates, but hasn’t heard if any plan to attend. The search firm said it was open to having private and public meetings with any group requesting them, but Lara said he did not request such a meeting because he wanted input from this area sent directly to members of the school board.

“We will send our findings directly to the school board,” he said. “And I hope they will be listened to. All of the LAUSD search firm’s input sessions have been poorly attended.”

School board president Steve Zimmer told LA School Report that community input and feedback did not end with the two weeks of community forums and surveys. He said the board will welcome input throughout the process, although the list of final candidates would be kept secret.

Today’s forum expects to have many more attendees than the search firm’s forums because of the involvement of community leaders. The event will be in Spanish and English and will include a survey of open-ended questions.

A panel scheduled to explain the search process and the duties of the superintendent includes: Martha Sanchez, of Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and an LA Unified parent; Holly Jackson, a teacher at Mack Elementary School and an LA Unified parent; Jorge Nuño, chief executive officer of Nuevo South and an LA Unified parent; and Ingrid Villeda, a member of the UTLA board and parent of an LAUSD graduate.

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Movie poster of ‘The Birth of a Nation.”

As the Confederate flag came down from the South Carolina State Capitol today, LAUSD teacher Jose Lara continued to drum up support for a petition to change the name of the David Wark Griffith Middle School because the director’s film “The Birth of a Nation” is racist, according to Lara.

“I have been extremely pleased with the way the word has gotten out, people are really angry,” Lara told the LA School Report. He hit the goal of 200 signatures in less than two days and now is shooting for 500 petition signers. “The school board knows about it by now.”

The next step, Lara said, is to take the petition to District 2 board member  Mónica García, who represents the east Los Angeles school. For a change to occur, a majority of the seven board members would have to approve a resolution. As of today, Garcia has said nothing publicly about the situation nor did her office return messages, seeking comment. Further, none of the public officials or state legislators who have the school in their district responded to requests for comment.

Lara said he was thrilled about a bill being proposed at the state level that would ban state and local properties after Confederate leaders. Two schools named after Robert E. Lee would have their names changed within two years.

“That doesn’t affect D.W. Griffith school, which is named after a racist,” Lara said.

Griffith’s 1915 Civil War epic, which was based on a book called “The Clansman,” was protested as racist at the time of its release.

“It’s 2015, and children shouldn’t to a school named after someone who spread this racist propaganda,” Lara said. “It’s a place for education. To have a name like this on a school in this community is a contradiction.”

Reyna Hernandez wrote on the petition site: “The children, families and community at Griffith Middle school desire a school to be proud of. A school free of racism.”

Former student Rita Diaz signed the petition even though she now lives in Wentzville, Mo. She wrote, “We have known about the racist director since we attended this school, however we never had a voice. This is the opportunity to correct their mistakes and give our students something worthy to represent and be a part of.”

Many of the school alumni who are signing the petition thought the school was named after Col. Griffith Jenkins Griffith, for whom L.A.’s largest park and observatory are named. That Griffith, although a philanthropist to the city, wasn’t a very nice guy and had a reputation of a raging alcoholic. He was convicted of shooting his wife in the eye.

“It doesn’t take much research to find out about D.W. Griffith,” said Lara, “and as a teacher I have a hard time seeing this as a school that honors this man.”

D.W. Griffith also directed a film about prejudice called “Intolerance” a year later in part as response to the negative criticism of “The Birth of Nation” and how it glorified the Ku Klux Klan.

The school was named in 1939, while Griffith was still alive. He died in 1948. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6535 Hollywood Blvd. In 1999, the Director’s Guild stripped him of his Lifetime Achievement Award, and Griffith has been commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp.

At the time the school took his name, the neighborhood in East Los Angeles was predominantly Jewish and Asian. Some of the Buddhist temples from the era still stand. Now, the neighborhood is predominantly Latino, and the school population is 98 percent Hispanic.

Where do the name changes stop? Communities around the country are now debating whether schools named after such people as Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president, should have their names changed because their namesakes owned slaves. (There is a Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles.)

“I haven’t yet weighed in on the Jefferson school yet, we have to take it on a case by case basis,” said Lara. “It depends on the diversity and sensitivity of the community.”

UTLA’s Jose Lara with NEA President Lily Eskelsen García

Jose Lara, a prominent leader of the LA teachers union, UTLA, was recently named the 2015 Social Justice Activist of the Year by the National Education Association (NEA).

Lara helped lead a successful grassroots effort to get the LA Unified school board to adopt ethnic studies as a graduation requirement. He is vice president of the El Rancho Unified School Board, dean at LA Unified’s Santee Education Center and a member of the UTLA board.

Lara received the award Sunday at NEA’s Representative Assembly in Orlando, Fla., which was attended by 7,000 members. The award honors the member who “demonstrates the ability to lead, organize and engage educators, parents, and the community to advocate on social justice issues that impact the lives of students, fellow educators, and the communities they serve,” according to the NEA.

“As I accept this award, I ask you once again to always remember that social justice is a verb and as Frederick Douglass once reminded us, ‘power concedes nothing without demand,’” Lara told the NEA crowd, according to a UTLA press release. “It is time we organize and start making demands.”

Lara led several rallies and protests outside LA Unified headquarters in the fall as leader of the Ethnic Studies Now Coalition, and spoke before the board in November when it voted to approve the new graduation standards.

The news made headlines around the state, as the district became the second in California to make ethnic studies a graduation requirement. (District leaders have since, however, expressed some reservations about moving forward with the requirement.)

“Educators have always been rabble rousers, activists and true believers,” NEA President Lily Eskelsen García said in a statement. “Jose Lara embodies this tradition, and his work illustrates how we make our mark on the world—as educators who understand the fearless power of collective action.”

Clockwise from left: Warren Fletcher, Gregg Solkovits, Alex Caputo-Pearl, Jose Lara

The teachers union’s annual Leadership Conference starts today (click here to see the program), and perhaps the biggest question on members’ minds is who will rise to challenge UTLA President Warren Fletcher as he seeks reelection in January.

Filing won’t officially begin until December, but the campaign season begins today.

“Most slates [of candidates] are going to be announced this weekend,” said UTLA Area Chair Jose Lara. “There will be flyers passed out at all the general sessions. There will be socials, and campaign parties, so to speak.”

Fletcher is expected to run for a second three-year term. Alex Caputo-Pearl, a former teacher at Crenshaw High (which has been reconstituted) is widely assumed to be running for president on a slate of candidates supported by the Progressive Educators for Action, or PEAC, a caucus within UTLA whose platform includes a call to end “the growth of corporate charter schools” and “standardized testing to determine students’ futures.”

Caputo-Pearl declined to comment.

Lara himself said he was “still deciding whether or not to throw my hat into the ring.” Lara, who is also running for the El Rancho Unified Board of Education, has been a fierce critic of Fletcher.

“Warren Fletcher has led our union down the wrong direction,” he said. “We have seen a series of constant losses. Any victories we get are despite Warren Fletcher, not because of him.”

As examples, he cited  the passing of Proposition 30 and Monica Ratliff’s shocking victory over Antonio Sanchez for LA Unified board member. UTLA had endorsed both candidates, and Fletcher actually showed up to Sanchez’s campaign night party.

Lara added that Fletcher had done nothing to back up UTLA’s Initiative for the Schools L.A. Students Deserve, which the membership passed overwhelmingly after Fletcher lent his support to it and called for the union to take a more aggressive stance on district policies, such as class sizes and the restoration of Adult Education.

“Warren has done everything to disrupt campaign,” said Lara. “He has paid lip service to it, [but also] obstructed it.”

UTLA Vice President Gregg Solkovits is also considered to be a possible candidate; he didn’t return a phone call, seeking comment.

One last possibility is a slate of “school-reform” minded teachers, akin to those involved in the now-defunct NewTLA, which hasn’t met for about a year. Although they are currently not organized under any one group, they are associated with organizations like TeachPlus and Teachers for a New Unionism. These teachers are more amenable to reforms favored by Superintendent John Deasy, such as the use of test scores in teacher evaluations.

A few of these teachers are planning to present a proposal at the conference that would take all UTLA voting online.

The conference will also include “core training,” which, according to the program’s introductory letter, will “offer concrete guidance on three pressing issues: countering the destabilizing threat of Parent Trigger, understanding teacher evaluation, and building better schools through community and political organizing.”

Other highlights include caucus meetings, Fletcher’s “State of the Union” speech and a screening of the film Lincoln.

Previous posts: LA Teachers Proposing Online Voting System for Union Elections; ‘Political Season’ Starting with UTLA Leadership Conference; Union President Likely Faces 2014 Challengers