What if LAUSD unions stood up for kids instead of themselves?

L.A. Unified's employee unions are prepping the public for another schools closure, their third in about four years. Union leaders will say it's for the kids. In this case as in the others, it's the kids and their families who will be hurt.

In 2019, United Teachers of Los Angeles struck for a full week for higher pay and benefits — it was for the kids, they said. They got modest wage increases for their efforts but left the district in worse financial condition.

And beginning in March 2020, the same union shuttered schools for 18 months in response to the pandemic. That too, was for the kids, union leaders said, despite data showing K-12 kids were less likely than all other age groups to catch Covid, get hospitalized or die. In fact, the data soon showed that it was, in fact, the closure that hurt LAUSD's 500,000 students. Confronted with evidence that students were falling behind union leader Cecily Myart-Cruz dismissed the learning loss as irrelevant.

“Our kids didn't lose anything,” she told Los Angeles Magazine in an interview so extraordinary it went global. “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.”

This year, it's the LAUSD's service workers, represented by the Service Employees International Union. They're threatening to strike, claiming the district has $4.9 billion in reserves. LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has flatly contradicted that figure, stating “We're not sitting on $5 billion worth of reserves, and to say that is inspiring false hope — period. I stand by it.”

“Reserves” turns out to be a somewhat ambiguous number.