Crenshaw School Community Fights For Real Improvement and Against LAUSD Superintendent’s Scorched-Earth Approach
By:
Christina Lewis, Crenshaw High Special Education Teacher
Irvin Alvarado, Crenshaw High Alumni, Coalition for Educational Justice Organizer
Alex Caputo-Pearl, Crenshaw High Social Justice Lead Teacher, UTLA Board of Directors
Eunice Grigsby, Crenshaw High Parent, Crenshaw High Alumna
On October 23, LAUSD Superintendent Deasy announced he intends to reconstitute Crenshaw High School. This scorched earth “reform” that is destructive for students, communities, and employees has been used at Fremont, Clinton, Manual Arts, and more in LAUSD, despite courageous push-backs at those schools.
The Crenshaw school community is determined to fight back. The slogan that permeated the emergency 150-person Crenshaw Town Hall Meeting at the African-American Cultural Center on October 4 crystallizes the struggle -- “Keep Crenshaw: Our School, Our Children, Our Community.”
In an attempt to disarm the push back and win public support, Deasy is combining the reconstitution with a full-school magnet conversion. Crenshaw stakeholders are, of course, open to conversations about changes that will improve conditions and outcomes for our students -- but those must be collaborative, well-resourced, and must serve all students. That said, it is clear that Deasy’s main objective is not magnet conversion – it is to take top-down control of the school and reconstitute (which means removing all faculty and staff from the school, with an “opportunity to re-apply”).
The school community says NO to any form of reconstitution, and YES to school improvement that includes stakeholders and holds LAUSD accountable for its years of neglect and mismanagement.
