LA’s school counselors strike back
“The strike of UTLA’s 33,000 members across some 1,200 schools, the first since 1989, began last Monday, January 14. It was, like most work stoppages, about pay and benefits and an expired collective bargaining agreement. It was also about unteachably large class sizes (of 40, sometimes 50 students) and similarly burdensome ratios for nurses, social workers, librarians, and counselors. The union’s demand for more counselors, in particular, emerged more strongly than in other recent teacher strikes — because, Morales says, of the increasingly acute needs of LA’s majority brown and working-class student population. Counselors are essential mentors to new immigrants and first-generation college-goers. They connect students and parents to social services and help them integrate into the community. In this sense, the strike was as much about an ideological question as a labor dispute: Who is the public being served by public education?”