Why Los Angeles parents are suing LAUSD, teachers union
Imagine reading a text message from your 11-year-old son in which he tells you he wants to die.
Now imagine you’re heartsick, but not entirely surprised. After all, you’ve seen this coming.
Your once-happy, healthy, active child has lately become sullen and depressed. Instead of going out and engaging socially with his friends, he sits in his room day and night surfing the Internet and playing violent computer games.
He has angry outbursts toward his family, he’s gained considerable weight … and now he’s contemplating suicide.
It didn’t used to be this way. Until relatively recently, much of his day was taken up with an activity that challenged his mind, encouraged interaction with his peers and gave him a sense of purpose.
It was called school, and he always did well at it. But it has been over a year since he and all his classmates were barred from the classroom out of fear over COVID-19 and told to educate themselves at home with a laptop and a connection to Zoom.
And it seemed like a prudent idea at the time, given how little we knew about the virus.
But we know considerably more now.
For starters, we know the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stated with confidence that schools can — and should — re-open for in-class instruction by adopting a few commonsense precautions.
We also know we’re paying a devasting price for distance learning that includes an epidemic of depression, indifference, obesity … and a skyrocketing rates of youth suicide.
Moreover, students are increasingly requiring expensive medical and psychological care, and many already cash
strapped parents have had no choice but to enroll their children in private schools.
Meanwhile, public schools across the state remain closed while the governor, the Legislature and local school districts continue to dicker with the unions representing California teachers over the conditions under which their members will return to the classroom. In Los Angeles, the demands are especially outrageous. They include defunding law enforcement, spending more on homelessness, cash payments and a laundry list of items that have nothing whatever to do with the safety or wellbeing of students or teachers.
For a handful of parents, the unnecessary delays have become intolerable, and now they’ve turned to the courts for help.
On March 30, four families represented by the Freedom Foundation, a national nonprofit advocacy organization that fights against the abuse of power by public employee unions, filed a first-of-its-kind personal injury lawsuit in California Superior Court against the Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD), United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) its president, Cecily MyartCruz, and executive director Jeffrey Good, for the damages the protracted closure has caused their children and themselves.
In the lawsuit, the parents’ allegations are focused on the legal relationship between their children, LAUSD and UTLA.
Under the well-established doctrine of in loco parentis — Latin for “in the place of a parent” — LAUSD has a legal responsibility to make decisions and act in the best interests of its students. By failing to return the students to class because of UTLA’s obstruction, LAUSD violated this responsibility.
What’s more, UTLA knew about LAUSD’s responsibility and the harm the plaintiffs’ children were suffering and still continued to prevent a return to class.
The parents are asking the court to recognize these legal relationships and their corresponding responsibilities, and to order that UTLA stop putting its political agenda over the health and well-being of the plaintiffs’ children and the other 600,000 students in LAUSD.
For more than a year, the school district, the teacher’s union and Myart-Cruz have taken actions we now know have resulted in very real damages to the students they’re supposed to be serving.
If their consciences won’t allow them to set aside their politics and opportunism long enough to perform their proscribed duties, maybe the law can.