Cecily Myart-Cruz is the head of the United Teachers for Los Angeles
A left-wing L.A. teacher’s union boss who wanted to keep schools closed due to COVID but limit Zoom classes to just four hours a day now says it doesn’t matter if kids missed out on traditional education like learning times tables, because they learned about BLM riots instead.
Cecily Myart-Cruz – who in the past claimed reopening schools was racist and who insists education is ‘political – made the comments in an interview with Los Angeles Magazine.
The ultra-woke teacher is the head of The United Teachers Los Angeles which represents 33,000 teachers from the L.A. Unified School District.
Instead of focusing just on issues that affect parents, teachers and students in L.A. schools, she has gone to bat on issues like the Israel Palestine conflict, Medicare for all and protesting California’s eviction laws.
Most notably, she has fought Gavin Newsom on his plan to reopen schools last April. She said that it was racist towards communities where COVID-19 was more rampant and those were typically minority or lower income communities.
She also said her teachers wouldn’t teach remotely for more than four hours a day and claimed it was because it wasn’t good for kids to be in front of screens for any logner.
Asked about how lockdowns had negatively impacted kids, she told LA Magazine: ‘There is no such thing as learning loss. Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables.
‘They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest.
‘They know the words insurrection and coup.’
She also snapped at the reporter for suggesting that some of her approaches are ‘radical’, saying: ‘It is not radical to ask for ethnic studies.
‘It is not radical to ask for childcare. It’s not radical to ask for police-free schools so that students don’t feel criminalized. That is not radical; that’s just fact.’
Her other remarks included ‘reopening schools without a broader improvement of schools will be unsafe and will deepen racial and class inequalities’ and ‘You can recall the Governor, you can recall the school board. But how are you going to recall me?’
Most notably, Myart-Cruz has fought Gavin Newsom on his plan to reopen schools last April. She said that it was racist towards communities where COVID-19 was more rampant and those were typically minority or lower income communities
Myart-Cruz at a protest last November after Biden won the election to demand Trump accept defeat. She only became President of the UTLA in February 2020 – a month before schools shut down around the country and the world
Before becoming the head of the teacher’s union, Cecily Myart Cruz attended Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, then Mount Saint Mary’s, a Catholic women’s college in Brentwood. She graduated in 1995, and on to Pepperdine to gain her teaching certificate – where fees now stand at $80,000-a-year.
She started her teaching career in Compton then went to an elementary school Westwood where kids first thought she was too strict but ended up ‘loving her’, according to a teacher who taught next door.
She is now divorced from her husband of 16 years and the pair share a ten-year-old son.
Now, she is dating VanCedric Williams, an elected member of the Oakland Unified School Board, according to the Los Angeles Magazine article.
She then went to teach at Mesa Elementary in Crenwshaw, where students and their families were less affluent. She didn’t last long there, according to former colleagues.
In 2020, the former head of the union – Alex Caputo Pearl – reached his term limit, he endorsed her to take over.
She stopped teaching 2014 to devote herself to the union full time and was part of the leadership team when dues were increased from $689-a-year to $917 in 2016.
She took over in February 2020 – a month before the pandemic closed schools all over America and the world.
There are 33,000 teachers in the union but only 5,000 voted in the election where she became president with 69 percent of the vote – about 3,500 votes.
Earlier this year, she blamed ‘white wealthy parents’ for wanting to get kids back into classrooms, saying: ‘Unfortunately, the plan reverts to deeply flawed ideas in Gavin Newsom’s proposal in December to offer school districts more money if they open faster.
‘If you condition funding on the reopening of schools, that money will only go to white and wealthier schools that do not have the transmission rates that low income black and brown communities do.’