Wednesday’s school board meeting was standing room only as teachers, parents and a high school student took to the podium to voice their opinions about the Manhattan Beach Unified Teaching Association’s protest.
Teachers are refusing to write letters of recommendation for students, among other extra-curricular activities that they will no longer be engaging in until they can reach an agreement with the district about teachers’ salaries.
James Lock, a Manhattan Beach Middle School teacher and father, was the first to stand at the podium and say that both as a parent and as a teacher, he thinks the protest is wrong.
“Now these teachers are looking [students] in the eye—at the very least I hope—and saying, ‘No. Even though you’ve done everything I asked of you, I won’t be there when you need me,” he said.
“I challenge both sides now to end this because regardless of blame, these are the ones you’re hurting,” he said, motioning to the students at the meeting. “Look at their faces.”
The crowd applauded and cheered.
Michelle Lautanen, Pacific Elementary School second grade teacher, followed Lock’s speech by asking students participating in the union’s protest not to “bully other teachers to not write letters.”
“Your job is to help our kids, not to hurt them,” she added. “The way you’ve been behaving it’s been like war. You’re asking for unreasonable demands.”
Karl Kurz of the union said that they anticipated this kind of backlash to their protest. The union has posted an open letter to angry parents on their website, www.mbutanow.org.
“Rather than be angry about us choosing not to offer a voluntary service that we have in the past, a service you have grown to rely on and feel entitled to, your anger should be directed at the individuals who have unnecessarily driven the financial situation of some of the finest professional educators in California into the ground,” the letter states.
Union representatives did not attend the school board meeting and chose instead to see how today’s mediation meeting with the district goes, Kurz said.
“There’s no reason to work people into a tizzy when they already are,” he said.
He said that although some teachers are speaking out against the union’s protest, many others are active and supportive participants. Yesterday Kurz said many of the teachers at Mira Costa High School, where he teaches, were wearing blue to show their support for the union.
Rafeed Kahn, a senior at Mira Costa High School, said that when he heard about the protest he didn’t know whose side to take. He said he is torn between wanting to support his teachers and also wanting to support district administrators, who he does not know personally, but who he knows have also worked to help students.
“We as students cannot pick a side because we don’t know which side to go to,” he said.
He also said that although members of the school board and district administrators have offered to write recommendation letters for students in place of teachers, the problem still remains unresolved for students working on college applications.
“You guys are trying to find a solution to a problem, but it’s putting a band-aid over it,” he said to the school board. “You’re putting a band-aid over a dam that’s about to burst. With all due respect you don’t know us as well [as teachers].”
“He is exactly right,” said district superintendent Michael Matthews at the end of the meeting. “Nobody knows a student better than a teacher. We will have letters for our students and they will be as good as they possibly can be. It’s a big concern to us.”
Kahn said that all he wants is for the situation to be resolved somehow.
“All I ask as a humble student of Mira Costa, as a humble resident of Manhattan Beach, is to please find a resolution,” he said. “We do not wish to pick a side. We do not wish to throw ourselves into the fray. We ask for a solution soon.” ER
