On 5th day of L.A. teachers’ strike, sunny optimism rises
LOS ANGELES — If striking Los Angeles teachers needed an omen as they rallied in Grand Park downtown Friday, Mother Nature obliged. After four days of picketing in rain and chill and gloom, the sun burst forth.
“Do you feel your power?” union President Alex Caputo-Pearl asked the masses, who stretched from the steps of City Hall through Grand Park all the way to the Music Center.
They thundered their response.
Union treasurer Alex Orozco reminded teachers that bargaining teams could hear the mon the other side of the stage, inside City Hall.
Thousands raised fists, thrust signs skyward and chanted: “Let’s go, team! Let’s go, team!”
With the celebrity help of singer Aloe Blacc, musician Tom Morello and actor Sean Astin, teachers made noise and memories _ and also made their point.
The theater of this rally and numerous others this week have made it diffifficult for the school system’s bargaining team to make its own points: that it was the union that walked away from negotiations, and that the district faces serious fifinancial problems.
But both teams seemed ready to get down to business.
“We need our educators and our students back in school come Tuesdaymorning. The onus is on us ... as leaders to do what we have to do,” said L.A. schools Superintendent Austin Beutner in a late afternoon news conference. He said hemet with Caputo- Pearl and L. A. Mayor Eric Garcetti at 6:45 a.m. and had been in and out of bar- gaining efforts as needed.
“Too many students are missing out on the education they should be getting,” he said. “We need to solve this now.”
It was unclear at midday if the union’s big event would prove a climax or just one more rally-the-troops moment in a protracted job action. Still, the L.A. teachers’ strike ushered in its fififth day with optimism.
Teams from L.A. Unified School District and United Teachers Los Angeles began the newround of talks about noon Thursday and didn’t fifinish that session until just after midnight Friday.
The length of the fifirst day of new talks was one hopeful sign. Another, perhaps, was a mutual understanding that neither side would discuss the content of negotiations in public. Competing news conferences had become a forum for harsh rhetoric and accusations of bad faith.
Talks resumed before noon Friday and were expected to stretch into the evening.
At Grand Park, the crowd streamed in a sea of red from every direction. On one side, school band directors led students in playing “Uptown Funk,” holding up sheet music or clipping it onto the gate barriers.
Some in the c rowd chanted, “We are the parents, the mighty, mighty parents,” and raised their signs to the beat.
One parent on hand was Sylvia Barrera, whose daughter Rosie, 9, attends Stanford Avenue Elementary in South Gate. Rosie was with her mother rather than in class.
All week, Barrera has opened her house on Ohio Avenue to striking teachers, allowing them to use the bathroom, pouring coffee and handing out pastries.
“At least they’re talking,” she said, of the union and the district. “There is something happening, and that gives us hope.”
Not all parents were cheering onthe rallies. One parent of a fourth-grader, who did not attend Friday’s event, said she was troubled by the union’s messaging and militancy.
The parent, whore quested anonymity over concern about retaliation against her child, said she asked both the district and a teacher whether she should keep her child home fromschool during the strike.