Los Angeles teachers on strike with support from community

Cole Marullo, Reporter

On Monday in Los Angeles, teachers started to demand higher pay and smaller classes and more support staff. The strike affected around 500,000 students at around 900 schools in the district, it is the second largest school district in the nation. This protest could also possibly affect many other districts around California and across the world.

More than 30,000 public schools in Los Angeles began a strike on Monday after the Los Angeles Teachers Union and Los Angeles Unified School district that led to the teachers protesting on Monday, making it the first protest in three decades. These people are in the streets on Los Angeles right now protesting to try and get smaller classes, better pay, and more support staff for teachers. This protest also leaves around 500,000 or more students without teachers. The schools are still open but most parents are just keeping their children home because of there being no teachers.

The district has been hiring substitutes but there are still many classes without teachers. The district also stretches over to wealthy areas like Pacific Palisades to working-class suburbs like Montebello. In a school called John Burroughs Middle School, the classrooms were mostly empty Monday. With around 40 percent of the students in that school in the gymnasium, auditorium and other multipurpose rooms to work on school-provided computers and Ipads with one or two substitutes having to monitor around a couple hundred kids at a time.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has remained largely out of the fray in the teacher’s protest. The union has accused Beutner of favoring charter Schools over Public Schools by taking away more resources and students from traditional public schools.

On Wednesday Garcetti’s office announced in a brief statement that it would hold talks between the groups at Los Angeles City Hall, the same building where tens to hundreds to thousands of teachers railed at on Monday. The district officials moved closer to satisfying the union’s

demands as teachers threatened to strike.