Panel: Safely Re-Opening America's Schools

Safely Re-Opening America's Schools 

Thursday, May 28, 2020 | 

The question of how schools can be reopened in ways that protect the health and safety of students, teachers and other adult staff is not only a challenging one, but one which is dynamic and changing, as we grapple with new developments such as regional outbreaks and rising incidences of COVID-19 related pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome. This webinar examined those challenges, discussed the current state of our knowledge on best practices and sound policies, and provided guidance to educators and policymakers on how to move forward under harrowing circumstances.

You can find a recording of the panel and links to the documents discussed at: https://www.shankerinstitute.org/event/safely-re-opening-americas-schools.

Resources on School Reopening

Resources on school reopening.

AFT Plan on Safely Reopening America's Schools.

Learning Policy Institute Brief on Reopening Schools in the Context of COVID-19: Health and Safety Guidelines From Other Countries

Share My Lesson K-12 Culminating Capstones: End-Of-Year Projects for Distance Learning Success Webinar

NPR on Remote Learning Gaps for Low Income and Special Needs Children">

What Leftists Who Won’t Support Biden Overlook: Trump

What Leftists Who Won’t Support Biden Overlook: Trump: The consequences of a Trump second term don’t loom large in their electoral calculations.

What Other Countries Can Teach U.S. Schools About Reopening

When a Community Fought for Its Schools

When a Community Fought for Its Schools

Juan Gonzalez is a veteran journalist who wrote a regular column for the “New York Daily News” for many years. He retired from the “News” but frequently appears on “Democracy Now” as co-host with Amy Goodman. Gonzalez is renowned as an investigative reporter and champion of justice. He wrote this post for the blog. 

From the blog of Diane Ravitch.

New Brunswick, New Jersey Community Fights to Save a Public School
From Corporate Hospital Industry Expansion

A plan by the political and financial elite of Central New Jersey to demolish a downtown New Brunswick public school this summer so that one of the state’s largest hospital chains can embark on a $750-million expansion has provoked repeated street protests since January, drawn hundreds of angry parents and community residents to public meetings and has already spawned two lawsuits – even in the midst of the coronavirus lockdown.

​The fight to save the Lincoln Annex Public School has emerged as a classic David-and-Goliath battle. On one side are New Brunswick’s low-income Latino residents. More than 50 per cent of the city’s population is Hispanic. Most are immigrants from Mexico and Central America, and many reside in rented houses surrounding the downtown business district. They have garnered support from a dozen Rutgers student organizations and the Rutgers faculty union, AAUP-AFT. 

Arrayed against that community alliance is a group of powerful and entrenched institutions that have long pursued a policy of gentrifying the city. They include Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, the Rutgers Cancer Institute, the New Brunswick Development Corp. (DEVCO), and the Middlesex County Democratic Party machine, led by Mayor James Cahill, who has ruled New Brunswick for nearly 30 years.
​​​
​Last June, RWJ/Barnabas Health, Rutgers and several major state politicians announced plans to build a new 12-story $750-million cancer research and treatment pavilion. At the time, however, they didn’t specify the exact location of the new building, even though internal emails later obtained by parent advocates show they had already decided where. Within months, some local media began reporting that talks were underway behind the scene for the city’s Board of Education to sell a public middle school across the street from RWJ, so that the school could be demolished and the cancer pavilion erected there.

​Lincoln Annex School has an enrollment of 760 children, more than 94% of them Hispanic and more than 80% from economically disadvantaged families. Many parents of the students are not eligible voters and therefore have very little political influence. The school, however, was only opened in September of 2016, after the city purchased the former St. Peter’s elementary and high school, and completely renovated the site at a cost to taxpayers of $22 million. As a result, Lincoln Annex is in far better condition than other schools in the district, and it happens to be one of the city’s best performing schools, with an excellent gifted and talented program.

Read more.  https://dianeravitch.net/2020/05/27/juan-gonzalez-the-struggle-to-save-a-public-school-in-new-brunswick-new-jersey-from-corporate-clutches/

Demanding End to 'Failed Billionaire-Backed' Policies, 200+ Teachers and Activists Urge Biden to Go Bold on Public Education

Demanding End to 'Failed Billionaire-Backed' Policies, 200+ Teachers and Activists Urge Biden to Go Bold on Public Education

Trump and the New Confederacy - Who Is the Enemy ?

Liberation Road and a few others on the left have identified the ‘New Confederacy’ as our main enemy—the main enemy of the working class, communities of color, queer people, women and immigrants. In this 3-way interview, Liberation Road members pull apart the idea of the New Confederacy and its relationship to the Republican Party and Trump. They share why we see this political bloc as the main danger to our people; what we think it will take to defeat it and why this matters strategically in organizing for socialism.

Bill Fletcher Jr. (BF) is. the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; an editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the author of many books, a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web.    

BA is an organizer in the ecological justice and radical science movements.

E is a labor organizer in the U.S. South.

Who and what is the New Confederacy, and why do we believe that it is the main enemy our people must confront and defeat?  

BF: “New Confederacy” or the neo-Confederates refers to the specific form of right-wing populism that we have witnessed grow in the USA. It is neo-Confederate in that its basic soul is rooted in the white settler state and the formation known as the Confederate States of America.  The New Confederacy is a political alignment of secular and religious right-wing populists; elements of the white middle class particularly small business and highly paid workers; and elements of capital that believe they can control any sort of reactionary mass movement. Neo- fascists can also be found within the New Confederacy.    

The New Confederacy is our main enemy because it is growing, rather than declining; it seeks to upend democratic capitalism and introduce a 21st century apartheid system in the USA and to destroy the mass organizations of the people, including trade unions. Their approach to the environmental catastrophe is both denial and open opportunism.

E: The New Confederacy is a right-wing united front that has aligned the leadership of the Republican Party and its base under the banner of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capital. We use the term “New Confederacy” because this alliance is a thru-line of American history and American racial capitalism. We have to call it what it is. The Confederacy was an alliance of Southern capitalists who decided to wage the most brutal of wars in order to preserve slavery. The New Confederacy pays allegiance to that same brutality, which has never died in American politics.

The New Confederacy hasn’t come out of nowhere; it’s been systematically built through takeovers of state legislatures, governorships and city councils. It’s in the White House and in many State Houses. Trump seemed like a surprise to many, but the takeover of the Republican Party by Trumpists builds out of the Tea Party, the Bush years, and decades of austerity from Reagan on. So the New Confederacy is an intentional alliance: the elements of capital that benefit most from it have decided that genocidal fervor is an acceptable price to pay in order to maintain their power.

BA: This political bloc shows continuity with “Confederate” history in its tendency to split away from the structures of the US in moments of crisis, when all of the contradictions have come to bear their weight. This is how the Confederates responded to Reconstruction, the New Deal, Civil Rights, and now to the ecological and economic crises.    

Should Billionaires Plan Education's Future?

Cuomo is Letting Billionaires Plan New York's Future. It Doesn't Have to be This Way Zephyr Teachout and Pat Garofalo May 14, 2020 The Guardian The New York governor is replacing elected representatives with private, unaccountable monopolists, and lawmakers across the US are doing the same thing. Too many decision-makers are ceding their policy to corporate power and private sector privileg

`Lawmakers are notably MIA in the middle of a pandemic - and by all accounts Cuomo likes it that way.', Photograph: Lev Radin/Pacific Press/REX/Shutterstock // The Guardian

Last week, New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, announced that Bill Gates would be responsible for “reimagining” New York’s education system. Cuomo also asked former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt to lead a panel planning New York’s post-Covid tech infrastructure. As Naomi Klein writes, the appointments of Schmidt and Gates represent a “Pandemic Shock Doctrine … that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up [and] treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent – and highly profitable – no-touch future”. As she points out, the two billionaires have disastrous records in the precise areas of public policy they are charged with leading. The Gates Foundation was the driving force behind high-stakes testing regimes and the Common Core fiasco. And Schmidt’s vision of the future is Black Mirror with a bow on it: mass surveillance plus public investment in companies in which he has a stake. Even if Schmidt and Gates had good policies, Cuomo’s knighting of them is offensive to American self-government. Nobody voted for them and they are accountable to no one. Cuomo, often accused of being too close to big campaign donors, is tripling down: he is simply allowing billionaires to plan our future directly, taking out the middlemen. In case you had any doubt that this is a new form of government worming its way into our old democratic ways, Cuomo anointed these tsars at the exact same time that he took vast new powers away from the state legislature, which has not been holding regular legislative hearings since 1 April. Lawmakers are notably MIA in the middle of a pandemic – and by all accounts Cuomo likes it that way. Turning away from locally-elected representatives, and towards billionaires with no accountability, represents a terrible erosion of democratic decision-making: Cuomo is quite literally replacing elected representatives with private, unaccountable monopolists. And too many other lawmakers across the US are doing the same thing. From California to Florida, states are turning to big corporations, CEOs and trade associations to not only decide when and how these states should “reopen”, but also what the post-virus economy should look like. The various taskforces and panels states have convened to chart a way forward are populated by executives from Pepsi, Dell, Disney and other corporations. The White House has trotted out a steady stream of Wall Street bankers, pharma executives, and big-box store CEOs to make promises about pandemic recovery measures. (Which haven’t been kept – for instance, weeks later, the promised Target and Walmart parking lot testing sites hadn’t materialized.) Meanwhile, the Cares Act, Congress’ coronavirus rescue package, is an authoritarian, top-down, big business restructuring of the already monopolized American economy. It gives extraordinary powers to the treasury secretary to reshape manufacturing, retail and banking in America, with almost no oversight, via easy access to trillions of dollars from the Federal Reserve. Too many decision-makers are ceding their policy to corporate power and private sector privilege. Even before this pandemic, turning to big businesses and their wealthy owners was a common condition of policymaking Even before this terrible pandemic, turning first to big businesses and their wealthy owners was a common condition of American policymaking. When federal lawmakers want to juice the economy, they pass tax cuts for big corporations and the wealthy. When state and city lawmakers want to promote economic development, they dole out giveaways to big companies, providing them a leg up over smaller, more local competitors, often without letting constituents know until the contracts have all been signed.

Rev. Barber's Poor People's Campaign calls for resistance

 Rev. Barber's Poor People's Campaign calls for res...:   The Poor People's Campaign, a grassroots group with branches in more than 40 states, is urging resistance to or noncooperation w...

Rev. Barber's Poor People's Campaign calls for resistance

SACRAMENTO PROGRESSIVE ALLIANCE: Rev. Barber's Poor People's Campaign calls for res...:   The Poor People's Campaign, a grassroots group with branches in more than 40 states, is urging resistance to or noncooperation w...

CDC RELEASES GUIDELINES FOR REOPENING SCHOOLS – I DON’T THINK OUR DISTRICTS ARE GOING TO FIND THEM MUCH HELP

Posted by Larry Ferlazzo | May 14, 2020 | school closures | 0  |     

The Centers For Disease Control released guides for reopening different sectors of society called Communities, Schools, Workplaces, and Events: Guidance for Where You Live, Work, Learn, Pray, and Play.

One part of it was Interim Guidance for Administrators of US K-12 Schools and Child Care Programs.

I might be missing something, but I’m not sure most districts are going to find it very helpful. The content seems to either be very obvious or very broad.

Of course, these versions are slimmer ones that the full report that the Trump Administration wouldn’t let the CDC release, and you can see those here.

I think we’re all going to have to wait for our State Department of Education guidelines….

SHARE

From the blog of Larry Ferlazzo.

Biden Working With Sanders to Build Unity

Former Vice President Joe Biden and progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders are teaming up to create joint “unity” task forces that will have a direct hand in shaping Democratic policy and the party’s agenda in 2020 and beyond.

The group of 48 lawmakers, labor leaders, economists, academics, and activists signals what the Democratic Party platform might look like going forward. Each campaign selected representatives to serve on six policy-specific committees: climate change, criminal justice reform, education, the economy, health care, and immigration.

Sanders’s allies seem encouraged about the names on the task force, which include vocal proponents for progressive policies like Medicare-for-All and a Green New Deal, like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) and Pramila Jayapal (WA). Sanders’s former campaign manager Faiz Shakir, who has been leading negotiations with the Biden campaign, told Vox that Biden’s team has been very “amenable and open” to working with progressives throughout the process.

“[Biden] has some room to run in terms of building a more fleshed-out policy agenda to campaign upon,” Shakir told Vox. “Because he hasn’t fleshed it out as deeply as some other candidates over the course of the primary, that’s an opportunity.”

Shakir sees an opportunity for progressives to not only make their mark on Biden’s policy agenda over the coming months, but also develop lasting relationships with the Biden campaign that could lead to having input over who joins Biden’s administration if he wins in November.

“The way in which we know it succeeded is if the policy is married with personnel who can execute that policy,” Shakir said.

………..

It is just not true that the left is not working with Biden.  

https://www.vox.com/2020/5/13/21257078/joe-biden-bernie-sanders-joint-unity-task-forces-democratic-policy

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ocasio-cortez-is-working-with-the-biden-campaign-on-climate-policy/2020/05/12/719a896e-94b2-11ea-82b4-c8db161ff6e5_story.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/13/biden-sanders-unity-task-forces-leaders-aoc-2544

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-13/ocasio-cortez-among-top-dems-promoting-biden-sanders-unity

-- 

https://www.vox.com/2020/5/13/21257078/joe-biden-bernie-sanders-joint-unity-task-forces-democratic-policy

Why does the media repeat this stuff?

CTA Responds to Budget Deficits - Funds Needed

Educators Experience Troubling Déjà Vu Amidst Announcement of $54 Billion Budget Deficit

SACRAMENTO — California Teachers Association President E. Toby Boyd issued the following statement Thursday after reviewing state budget reports released today outlining a $54 billion state budget deficit which could translate into $18 billion in cuts to education:

“Safely reopening schools and colleges requires resources and funding; not $18 billion in devastating cuts the $54 billion state budget deficit portends. These cuts would cause real harm to student learning at a time when they need more support. This also has an all-too-familiar ring for educators and students who were still recovering from the draconian cuts of the last recession. These cuts would undo the last six years of progress we have made on school funding. Our schools cannot endure another blow following this Coronavirus crisis.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly impacted all of us—our students, educators, families, friends, and neighbors. The pandemic has shined a light on the vital role that public education plays in our society and that educators play in the lives of students and their families. We are painfully aware that the state and country are facing a recession, but for years California students, schools, and educators have had to do more with less and we can’t let our students fall further behind.

“There is no solution that does not involve aid from the federal government combined with generating more state revenues. We are calling on the federal government to authorize $1 trillion in the next CARES Act and provide $175 billion for the Education Stabilization Fund to distribute to states. Contact your lawmaker today by calling 1-855-977-1770. CTA continues to support the Schools & Communities First initiative on the November ballot. We owe it to our students to do all it takes to recover together as a state and a nation.”

“We look forward to working with the legislature and the governor to ensure the health, safety and well-being of our students is at the forefront of these budget discussions.”

The 310,000-member CTA is affiliated with the 3 million-member National Education Association.


· https://www.cta.org/press-release/safely-reopening-schools-requires-resources-and-funding





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Trauma in the Classroom

Crisis in Our Classrooms

Frightened, anxious immigrant students try to focus on education

Editor’s note: All year we’ve reported on how educators are handling students with trauma stemming from natural disasters, poverty and more. The COVID-19 pandemic has added an additional traumatic layer to students’ lives, particularly for immigrant and undocumented children and youth (see sidebar below). Click here for ways to connect with and teach all students during this challenging time.


Published by CTA.
By Sherry Posnick-Goodwin
Photos by Kim Sanford

“Every day when my parents go work, I’m afraid they won’t come back,” says a girl, her voice shaky. “It’s scary to know they could take your parents away from you. My parents have sacrificed so much to give us a better life.”

“My neighbors always had big smiles on their faces,” recalls a boy. “But after the dad was deported, everybody was very sad, and they seldom went outside. Our community has changed.”

“My father was detained by ICE, and they put him in jail,” says a boy on the verge of tears. “After a year he couldn’t tolerate jail anymore and said he’d rather be deported, and he was. My family is afraid. When police and immigration officers come to our door, the adults hide, and the kids talk. We are just kids and we’re dealing with legal issues, and we have no idea of what to do.”



It’s 8 a.m. at Hoover High School in San Diego, and Mario Valladolid, a resource counselor for the Restorative Justice Practices Department, is holding a community circle in a classroom for some 30 students to share their anxiety about immigration issues and draw strength from one another. They are also learning about their rights so they’ll know what to do if immigration officers come to the door. (See sidebar below.) Some students are undocumented. Others have undocumented relatives.
Mario Valladolid, above and in the featured photo, leads a community circle with students concerned about immigration issues at San Diego’s Hoover High. (Students faces are blurred out for privacy and protection.)

It’s clear many are traumatized. One girl is weeping. The Educator has agreed not to use students’ real names or show their faces in this story because it might target them or relatives for deportation.

The teens express a strong desire to do something to help their families and communities, but they feel helpless. They try to distract themselves with social media and activities with friends and family. But there’s no escape from the constant worry.

“I’m trying very hard to cherish the things I now have,” says the girl who was crying. “You never know when everything might be taken away from you.”


“You can’t treat trauma with discipline. Instead, you have to create a culture where every student feels welcome and safe.”— Mario Valladolid, San Diego Education Association
Students are losing hope

Dolores Huerta Endorses Biden

antiracismdsa: Dolores Huerta Endorses Biden: Civil rights icon Dolores Huerta, who earlier backed Senator Kamala Harris of California for the Democratic presidential nomination, ...

Educators Respond to Covid

Hi Educator, The road to recovery from record unemployment and lost learning will run through our public schools. But our educators and students face serious challenges ahead. Lost state and local revenue will mean historic levels of layoffs and furloughs. Class sizes will be even larger. Educators will be even more overworked and underpaid. And students will lose out the most. Critical supports, much-needed programs, and opportunities will be unavailable to them. We need to come together now to make sure Congress prioritizes our students, parents, and communities with their next legislative actions.  Join me for a national tele-town hall about the work we need to do together to repair the economic damage done by the coronavirus for students, parents, and educators.

Tele-Town Hall for Educators, Parents, and Community Members We Rise Together Collective Action to Help Our Public Schools, Students, and Communities Recover from COVID-19 Thursday, May 14  7:00 p.m. ET / 4:00 p.m. PT  Sign Up

On the tele-town hall we’ll discuss what Congress needs to do to stabilize education funding, build bridges to opportunity for students and communities, and support the safety, health, and well-being of students and educators both now and when school buildings re-open. You will learn what you can do to demand that Congress support our students, parents, and educators so that our communities and local economies can thrive. Sign up for Thursday’s tele-town hall right now. I hope you can join us, Lily Eskelsen García President National Education Association

Parental Response - COVID 19

COVID! by Dignity In Schools, (DSC )CA.  

One of the ways the Black Parallel School Board fights for educational justice is through participation in a state wide parent organizing group, Dignity in Schools Campaign CA (DSC CA).  The purpose of the Dignity In Schools Campaign California (DSC CA) is to deepen grassroots community-based understanding of the historical role and future implications of school discipline, the relationship between schools & law enforcement, and the dehumanizing impact of the public education system and expand our movement’s political opportunities to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline, repair the inter-generational harm it has caused, and craft systemic alternatives for multiple generations.  It is made up of parent organizing groups who work to improve the status of under served student populations.  Our work has not stopped during COVID-19. 

Parents are clear the pandemic will widen an already enormous opportunity gap for Black Scholars.  Parents are clear we must have a voice and seat at the table when leaders are making decisions that will impact our scholars' futures.  In response to emergency education DSC CA is resounding what must be done in our Parent Racial Justice Demands for Emergency Schooling During COVID19.  Black and Brown parents work tirelessly in solidarity and demand educational justice now in emergency education and ultimately education reparations. 

 Please share to help us spread the word and publish and post the parent letter.  Here is a link to the the DSC CA website, where the demands are posted, https://dignityinschools-ca.org/stop-the-pandemics-school-pushout/ .  I have also attached a PDF version of the letter.   

In community, 

Ursula Yisrael, BPSB Parent Organizer  

Ursula DeWitt 1discipline4life@gmail.com

SCUSD- Internet Access

SACRAMENTO, CA — Sacramento City Unified School District, the City of Sacramento, and Comcast today announced a new effort to provide Sac City Unified families with free internet access. The new initiative, called Sac City Kids Connect, provides Comcast’s Internet Essentials program to qualifying low income families with internet access, provided they live in a Comcast service area. As part of the Sac City Kids Connect program, eligible families will be provided with a special code to access six months of free internet. The access codes will be provided in the coming weeks.  

Read press release in Spanish | Hmong | Chinese | Russian | Vietnamese. 

More information including eligibility requirements and instructions about how to sign up for the program can be found at  www.scusd.edu/kidsconnect. The site is designed for use with mobile phones or tablets. 

“Our mission to meet our students’ academic, social and emotional needs didn’t end when schools closed,” said Sac City Unified Superintendent Jorge Aguilar. “Lack of internet access is a barrier, even during normal times. In these extraordinary times, this barrier becomes all the more evident for many of our students, but especially our most vulnerable. We continue to work tirelessly to remove every obstacle that might prevent our students from reaching their educational goals.” 

“Here at the city one of our top concerns is making sure young people growing up in all of our neighborhoods have a chance to stay here and get a good job,” said Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg. “Unless we get them connected to the internet, this coronavirus pandemic threatens to put kids who already have a lot to overcome at an even greater disadvantage.” 

“Internet access is more important now than it has ever been,”  said John Gauder, Senior Vice President, Comcast California. “We are so pleased to partner with Sac City Unified and Sacramento’s visionary leadership team to help students get free access to the internet at home. For many, this will be the first time they have had that access and it is hugely meaningful.” 

Sac City Unified began its distance learning on April 13 and has worked to provide its students with access to computers and the internet. Today’s announcement of Sac City Kids Connect begins a public-private partnership that will serve as a model for districts throughout the state. The district estimates that approximately 6,600 of its students currently do not have internet access. 

Internet Essentials has an integrated, wrap-around design that addresses each of the three major barriers to broadband adoption that research has identified. These include: a lack of digital literacy skills, lack of awareness of the relevance of the Internet to everyday life needs, and fear of the Internet; the lack of a computer; and cost of internet service. The program is structured as a partnership between Comcast and tens of thousands of school districts, libraries, elected officials, and nonprofit community partners. For more information, or to apply for the program in seven different languages, please visit www.internetessentials.com or call 1-855-846-8376. Spanish-only speakers can also call 1-855-765-6995.  

'A Dangerous Idea': Public School Advocates Denounce Cuomo-Gates Plan Seizing on Pandemic to 'Reimagine' New York's Education System

'A Dangerous Idea': Public School Advocates Denounce Cuomo-Gates Plan Seizing on Pandemic to 'Reimagine' New York's Education System

Educational historian Diane Ravitch wrote in her blog that Cuomo’s interest in enlisting powerful billionaires to remake New York's public systems in the wake of the pandemic does not end with Gates. The governor has called on former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to advise him on "technology utilization" for schools while former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will oversee a large-scale contact-tracing effort. Schmidt has also been named to lead Cuomo's Blue Ribbon Commission aimed at "reimagining New York State's current systems of health and education."

"The pandemic is turning into a grand opportunity for the foxes to raid the hen house under cover of darkness," wrote Ravitch. "Parents, teachers, and students want a safe and orderly return to real education taught by real teachers in real schools."

See more:  https://dianeravitch.net/2020/05/06/tell-governor-cuomo-and-bill-gates-hands-off-our-public-schools/

Impact of Covid on Latino Students

Town Hall for #EdJustice:
The Impact of COVID-19 on Latino Students and Educators

Video is here,

https://www.facebook.com/lulac.national.dc/videos/269467734206191/

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the National Education Association (NEA) will be hosting the #EdJustice Town Hall tomorrow with the National Immigration Law Center and the Hope Center for Wellness for a comprehensive discussion on COVID-19 and its impact on Latino students and families. The virtual town hall will be moderated by María Peña, a journalist and digital reporter at Telemundo News.

The conversation will address virtual learning, strengthening access to school safety nets, mental health resources, and supporting and advocating for our immigrant and undocumented families.

We will also address the conditions under which schools could reopen and what they may look like once students return.

Join us as we come together to discuss ways we are responding to this crisis and working to ensure that our public schools help all students pursue their dreams regardless of where they come from, what they look like, or where they live.

To RSVP click here now.

Trump Could Win Again- Strategic Racism

Echo Chamber Could Hand Win to Trump… Again Erin Heaney April 24, 2020 Organizing Upgrade ...white progressives and leftists underestimate the...power of strategically racist messaging, and fail to...engage in the communities the Right is targeting — white folks who are impacted by a system that consistently puts profits before people. , SURJ This week we’ve seen an escalation in Trump’s tactics to deflect blame for the enormous suffering and scale of death that has been caused by his administration. His egging on of the ReOpen rallies and announcement that he will suspend immigration build on the foundation of anti-Asian racism and scape-goating of China that have dominated far-right, and increasingly, mainstream news outlets over the last few weeks.

Union Teachers Are Donating Their Stimulus Checks to the Undocumented

Undocumented workers are excluded from unemployment protections and stimulus checks, but not from union solidarity.

BY BROOKE ANDERSON

OAKLAND, Calif.—Olivia Udovic and her husband, Edgar Sánchez—both teachers in Oakland—are among millions of Americans receiving federal stimulus checks. The money didn’t stay in their bank account for long, however; the pair is part of a nationwide movement of teachers paying their checks forward to undocumented families in their schools. 

Udovic teaches kindergarten at Manzanita SEED Elementary, a dual-language school serving many immigrant households. Sixty-five percent of students there receive free or reduced-cost lunch. When schools closed March 27 in response to Covid-19, Udovic and her coworkers called parents for wellness check-ins. “Families were losing jobs, couldn’t pay rent and were left without food—especially undocumented folks who couldn’t access unemployment benefits,” Udovic says. 

The $2.2 trillion federal Covid-19 stimulus package provides $1,200 to taxpayers bringing home less than $75,000 a year (plus $500 per child) and expands unemployment benefits. But undocumented workers are excluded from both provisions, despite collectively paying billions in taxes. California created its own $125 million coronavirus disaster relief fund to provide $500 in cash to some 250,000 undocumented immigrants in the state—a little less than 15% of the undocumented workforce. For many, that won’t fill the gap.

So Udovic and other members of her union, the Oakland Education Association (OEA), organized teachers to pledge their stimulus checks to Centro Legal de la Raza’s Oakland Undocumented Relief (OUR) Fund. The fund provides $500 checks or pre-paid debit cards to each family—an important consideration for many undocumented people who do not have bank accounts. According to Udovic, as of April 20, 33 teachers have pledged more than $16,000.