Voices From The Community
Trust In The Time Of COVID
LAUSD teacher Nicolle Fefferman’s commitment to her students includes ensuring that they are safe before returning to school
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“After years of being given two tissue boxes a year, dealing with rat infestations, and using dirty bathrooms, we do not trust that the district has the commitment or resources to make us safe at school.”
- Nicolle Fefferman
In the Voices From The Community series, representatives of constituencies throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) express their concerns about the district and detail how they would like to move forward. The first three articles (here, here, and here) detailed the effects of charter schools on neighborhood public schools. In this latest installment, Nicolle Fefferman writes about her concerns as some special interest groups blame teachers for the fact that students have not returned to physical classrooms.
Fefferman is an LAUSD teacher who helped co-found the Parents Supporting Teachers (Padres Apoyando a Maestros) Facebook page. PST was founded just prior to the strike by LAUSD parents in January 2019. As parents rallied behind their teachers’ demands for improved learning conditions, the membership organically swelled to over 25,000 parents, teachers, and other supporters of public education. It is one of the largest online hubs in Los Angeles where parents and educators share important information on how to navigate both the district and local schools. By sharing hurdles and successes, PST is a landing place for those families looking for concrete solutions to support their children and public education.
Fifteen years ago I began teaching at Thomas Jefferson High School, which is located in South Central L.A. and is one of the 1,182 schools within LAUSD. For the past seven years, I have been teaching at John Marshall High School in Los Feliz. These schools from two different neighborhoods have a lot in common. Both of them were built in the 1930s and are large campuses with nice outdoor spaces that students scramble…
