Mrs. Lourdes López spoke that she feels so stressed that she has not been able to sleep more than for moments the last few nights, but Tuesday morning was even worse.
“I am the mother of three children, the two minors are in special education,” said the immigrant from Oaxaca. “Here we are, locked in because of the rain, but because they didn’t have classes, because of the strike in the schools.”
Doña Lourdes sells supplements and vitamins to help her husband, a garment worker, with family expenses, but now she will have to stay three days with her children, unable to go out to make sales or deliveries.
“You cannot imagine what this is going to harm us; with how expensive everything is, we are going to have less” to make payments and buy food, explains the mother of the family.
But what causes her the most stress is knowing that her children will miss classes, because “the three of them are learning English and, as I was saying, two need their special education classes, if they don’t go to class, they fall far behind.”
When she spoke with La Opinión, Mrs. Lourdes was trying to help two of her children with their homework, but those homework were in English and she only speaks Spanish.
“This is very difficult,” he explains.
“I am the mother, I know how my children fall behind if they miss three days of school; it will be very difficult for them to catch up later, especially my children in special education.”
Doña Lourdes said she felt that the children were left in the middle of a conflict in which they had nothing to do; In other words, she explained that the classes and food that her children receive at school became pawns in the demands of the union that led to the strike.
“They shouldn’t use children like that,” he declared. “I agree that they do their strikes but not during school hours. Children fell far behind throughout the pandemic and now they are barely catching up. The strike is now three days, but not even they (the workers) know if they are going to continue”.
According to statistics from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), 70,000 of its students take special education classes. It is a community that this time was left out of schools due to the strike.
But Mrs. María Nieto told La Opinión that the strike disproportionately impacts undocumented mothers.
“I work picking up children in Panorama City to take them to school and then when classes end,” explained Mrs. Nieto, mother of three minors, one of whom is also in special education.
Frequently, after picking up students, he takes care of them by his side while the parents of the students come to pick them up and this time, due to the strike, he is going to lose the money that he would pay for his services and that already impacts him, because of his condition immigration lacks government assistance.
However, what worries her the most and has also stressed her these days “is that they went on strike in the schools on the days when students have their state exams.”
“I have been helping my children prepare for these tests because they are important,” she said. Doña Mara, but she feels that the strike “interrupts all the work we have been doing.”
So after the strike “we are going to have to go and tell us when they are going to do those tests and do all the work again” of preparation, he said.
Mrs. Nieto explained that she would have liked that before deciding to go on strike “that the mothers and fathers of the family would have asked us what we thought.”
The president of the union that represents the 30,000 school bus drivers, teacher assistants, cafeteria workers and school custodians in Los Angeles, among other positions, Max Arias, said that the SEIU Local 99 union recognizes that the suspension of work of three days impacts the parents of students.
“We are very aware of the impacts our strike has on working families,” but he said that many workers on strike are parents of students from the same school district and “are parents who were already living in an untenable situation.”
He explained that school workers and parents whose income for their families is below the poverty line, which “impacts the parents” in the union, “and also the students who are their children.”
But Evelyn Alemán, coordinator of a group of parents organized for a quality education for their children, Nuestra Voz, told La Opinión that what the union leader must understand “is that the strike disproportionately impacts parents most vulnerable family members in our society”.
Alemán explained that in her organization “almost all the volunteers are undocumented, and almost all except two, with children in special education, and all with children who are learning English, so that they have that advantage of the language that their parents did not have.”
On Friday, when the strike had been announced but not yet started, Alemán called her group for a virtual meeting to talk about what they could do as mothers around the strike, “and three of the first twelve that came in did so crying. , others cried afterwards.
Aleman said that when they called the strike “they were unaware of the emotional impact it would have on the most vulnerable mothers.”
A mother of a family in Nuestra Voz wrote that “we are the union that defends our children, without help from anyone, nor being able to demand a raise, because of our immigration status we have the worst of the strike.”