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A minor in Pennsylvania is facing serious charges after a shooting in April that resulted in the death of a 12-year-old. Nolan Donald Grove, 13, allegedly shot and killed his friend, Kain Heiland, during a planned sleepover in York County.

Grove was charged with various crimes on Monday, including murder in the third degree and carrying a weapon without a license.

Based on the testimonies of witnesses and video surveillance of the area, the charges against Grove were determined. It has been reported that Grove retrieved the gun used in the shooting from his house ahead of the incident and was “playing” with it throughout the day.

At around 8:22 pm, Grove and Heiland, and one additional boy, were crossing someone’s garden when Grove allegedly said something about Heiland’s mother, to which Heiland replied for Grove to be quiet. Grove soon replied with, “You know what happens” or “You know what would happen,” tragically; Heiland was then struck by a gunshot.

Once the incident had occurred, the third friend ran home and told his parents, prompting them to notify the authorities. One crucial piece of evidence was that Grove went home and changed his clothes and washed his hands following the shooting.

In response to all these events, a GoFundMe page was established to help Heiland’s mother, Devin Rexroth. The page, created by a friend, was posted with the description of it being a “nightmare.”

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The post “A Guiding Light for 9/11 Truth.” A Tribute to Graeme MacQueen appeared first on Global Research.

In an obscure court filing, dozens of former FBI agents and others allege that an illegal CIA operation on US soil accidentally facilitated the 9/11 attacks. It should be a bombshell — if only anyone in the establishment would notice.

President George W. Bush, with Attorney General John Ashcroft (left), Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan Alsaud (second from left), and Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaks on November 19, 2001, before a prayer by Imam Abdullah Muhammad Khouj during a Ramadan dinner in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC. (Shawn Thew / AFP via Getty Images)

For all the ways the September 11 attacks continue to shape US culture and foreign policy, the event is still shrouded in a surprising amount of mystery. A recently unearthed bombshell court filing offers some possible clarity on the questions that continue to surround the attacks and their aftermath — and yet, like similar bombshells in recent years, it’s been studiously ignored by the media and political establishment.

First reported by Rolling Stone contributing editor Seth Hettena on the Substack SpyTalk, the media project run by veteran former Newsweek national security reporter Jeff Stein, those potential answers come in the form of a signed affidavit from Guantanamo military commission investigator Don Canestraro. The affidavit outlines the findings of a 2016 investigation by Canestraro, a longtime veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), into Saudi and CIA complicity in the terrorist attacks, findings that are squarely at odds with the story given to the public in their wake.

Relaying the information gathered from dozens of interviews he conducted with former FBI and CIA personnel, members of the 9/11 Commission, and US government officials, Canestraro’s affidavit outlines a sequence of events that, if true, suggest a botched and illegal domestic CIA operation was at the heart of the intelligence failure that enabled the attacks. More than that, it suggests there was a concerted cover-up of the grave blunder after the fact by both the CIA and the George W. Bush administration.

Foiled by the CIA

The affidavit outlines the overlapping claims of numerous agents that the CIA impeded law enforcement efforts that could have prevented the attacks. Several former agents recalled being blocked by the agency from sharing intelligence about the hijackers with the rest of the FBI.

The CIA knew from wiretaps that two of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Halid al-Mindhar, had multiple entry visas letting them travel to the United States, one former agent said, but didn’t pass it on to the bureau. Two other agents alleged that the CIA withheld information about the two men’s connection to the planner of the October 2000 al-Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole, which, if known, would have turned the case into a criminal investigation for the FBI to pursue.

One of those agents recalled a meeting with the CIA in which they were shown photos of three suspected terrorists, two of which would turn out to be future hijackers al-Hazmi and al-Mindhar. When the agent, referred to in the affidavit as CS-12, asked who was placing border crossing alerts on the suspects, which would have notified law enforcement about their entry into the United States, they were told no one was.

Later, when that same agent came across an electronic communication flagging that the two hijackers had entered the country, they were ordered to delete it immediately, because, having been obtained from intelligence sources, the dispatch could only be read by intelligence agents.

A “former senior FBI official” likewise told Canestraro that the CIA sat on the news that the hijackers had entered the United States in 2000. Why did the CIA so intensely gatekeep information on the future hijackers? That same official bluntly asserted that the agency was trying to recruit the two as intelligence sources. CS-12 recounted that he was frustrated in a conference call with FBI headquarters, in which they were ordered to “stand down” and stop looking for al-Mindhar, because the government was pursuing an intelligence gathering investigation on the suspect — something outside of the agent’s law enforcement remit.

In fact, multiple other witnesses told Canestraro that the CIA was hell-bent on infiltrating al-Qaeda. That includes not only two former FBI special agents, but also Bush’s chief counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke, who recalled that deputy CIA director Cofer Black told him prior to September 11 that the agency had no human intelligence sources in the terrorist group, and that “he was resolved to address this situation and penetrate Al Qaeda with informants,” Canestraro recounted.

It also included a former CIA official who had worked in the agency’s “Usama bin Laden [UBL] station,” tasked with keeping an eye on and combating the terrorist leader, who told Canestraro “there was extensive pressure from CIA management to develop human sources inside of Al-Qaeda,” according to the affidavit.

Though far from definitive, these allegations line up with theories about the lead-up to September 11 that have long floated around, including in Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy’s 2018 book, The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror. Drawing similarly on claims from former officials and agents — some of whom, Hettena points out, almost certainly overlap with Canestraro’s own sources — Nowosielski and Duffy had at the time made a somewhat speculative case that a failed CIA recruitment effort had accidentally facilitated the attacks.

Friends in High Places

The disclosure may also shed further light on the role of the Saudi government, whose complicity in the attacks was confirmed last year in a declassified 2017 report from the FBI. According to Canestraro’s sources, since the CIA is legally barred from conducting intelligence operations on domestic soil, they circumvented this by having the General Intelligence Presidency (GIP), the principal Saudi intelligence agency with which the CIA had a close relationship, do their work for them.

What this meant in practice was that Omar al-Bayoumi — the Saudi national who helped the two hijackers settle in the United States and was revealed as a GIP asset in last year’s disclosures — was paid generously via the Saudi embassy. That embassy was run by Prince Bandar “Bush” bin Sultan Alsaud, nicknamed for his close relationship with the Bush family, and through whom al-Bayoumi was being paid to co-opt al-Hazmi and al-Mindhar by pretending he was in favor of their cause, so they could become CIA sources on the inside of al-Qaeda.

This is allegedly the context for al-Bayoumi’s highly suspicious chance meeting with the two hijackers in a Los Angeles restaurant, as well as the extraordinary assistance he lent them afterward, which included helping them get housing, bank accounts, and driver’s licenses, cosigning their lease, giving them financial help, and even paying their first month’s rent and security deposit. This was the theory Clarke put out publicly, disclosing to Canestraro that it earned him an angry phone call from then CIA director George Tenet, who didn’t deny the charge.

Of course, the CIA did not manage to recruit al-Hazmi and al-Mindhar. Instead, they and seventeen other al-Qaeda operators went on to hijack four commercial airliners and use them to carry out the worst terrorist attack on US soil, killing nearly three thousand people. If the testimony Canestraro gathered is accurate, it means the CIA inadvertently helped cause the very disaster they were trying to infiltrate al-Qaeda to prevent, all because of the opaque and unaccountable way the agency has become accustomed to working in.

The Cover-Up

What followed was a concerted cover-up by the CIA, FBI bigwigs, and the Bush administration more broadly, according to testimony outlined in the affidavit.

One former agent recalled the FBI faced “diplomatic pressure” not to investigate the Saudi links to the attacks, while another who was tasked with investigating leads after the attacks charged that agents were told not to interview Saudi nationals. When one former agent learned about the existence of a pre-9/11 FBI cable outlining information about the hijackers that had been blocked from distribution, he passed it on to the bureau’s deputy director for counterterrorism, Pasqual D’Amuro, who never mentioned it ever again — all before the agent was promoted out of the blue and moved, they suspected, to be silenced.

This cover-up allegedly extended to the 9/11 Commission, which was theoretically meant to get to the bottom of the intelligence failures that led to the attack. Clarke told Canestraro that Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the commission, had been specifically chosen by then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice “to prevent damage to the Bush administration by blocking the Commission’s line of inquiry into the Saudi connection,” according to the affidavit.

One former commission investigator who was tasked specifically with looking into that very matter alleged that Zelikow limited the number of witnesses they could interview and blocked the investigator’s attempts to obtain documents. They were ultimately fired by Zelikow for obtaining through unofficial channels a classified index to Congress’s inquiry, which revealed agency reports about the Saudis’ complicity, a “minor security violation” as they saw it that was really about blunting the commission’s inquiry into the Saudi role.

The disclosures suggest that it was the United States’ own intelligence agency that played the leading role in shielding the 9/11 hijackers from detection and unwittingly facilitating their crime.

The CIA allegedly played a role in this too. One former FBI agent recalled learning that the CIA agent deployed to their FBI field office immediately after 9/11 was really there to look at FBI files and try to pin the blame on the bureau for the attacks. Another agent — identified by SpyTalk as likely being Mark Rossini, who was ultimately forced out of the FBI for leaking documents to an ex-girlfriend — recounted how CIA officials told them and their colleague prior to being interviewed by congressional investigators not to cooperate fully, because they were looking to “hang someone” for the attacks.

An officer sat in the room during the interview with investigators, leading the agent to leave out crucial and potentially damaging information in their testimony: that a report prepared by a colleague about the possible presence of hijackers al-Hazmi and al-Mindhar in the country had never been sent out to the rest of the FBI as intended, because it had been blocked by a CIA analyst — who subsequently lied that it had been passed on. The same FBI agent later overheard CIA director Tenet and director of operations James Pavitt discussing how keeping the CIA analyst from 9/11 Commission investigators had been a good idea.

Inside the House

Even accepting the picture painted by the affidavit leaves behind some loose ends. If Saudi intelligence was merely innocently doing the CIA’s bidding, why did FBI officials conclude that “there is a 50/50 chance [al-Bayoumi] had advanced knowledge the 9/11 attacks were to occur”? And if that’s the case, why didn’t al-Bayoumi act on this foreknowledge?

Still, the disclosures contained in Canestraro’s affidavit paint a compelling possible scenario for what went so terribly wrong in the lead-up to the September 11 attacks. They suggest that instead of the Saudi government, it was the United States’ own intelligence agency that played the leading role in shielding the 9/11 hijackers from detection and unwittingly facilitating their crime, all because of the agency’s extreme secrecy, and because it was acting outside the bounds of the law — far from the first or last such instance in the CIA’s history.

The agency then worked in concert with the Bush administration to cover all this up, with each using the screwup to launch several foolish wars, funnel more power and resources to themselves, and go on a spree of yet more lawbreaking.

But maybe the most astounding thing is that, just like last year, despite the magnitude of these allegations — and despite the colossal shadow the crime at hand cast over US society, and how it continues to drive both foreign and domestic policy for the worse — they’ve received little attention. At the time of writing, you can count the number of US outlets that have covered the affidavit on two hands: SpyTalk, Florida Bulldog, the Grayzone, RadarOnline, Breaking Points, Boing Boing, and this magazine, as well as Mumbai-based Firstpost, Free Press Kashmir, and the Beirut-based Al Mayadeen.

More than two decades later, there’s no price the US establishment won’t pay, no civil liberty it won’t bend, no effort it won’t go to prevent another September 11 — except, apparently, taking a critical eye to its own unaccountable intelligence agencies.

The untimely death of a software engineer at Google’s Headquarters in New York City has sent shockwaves through the tech giant and the entire community.

On Thursday night, a 31-year-old software engineer tragically jumped from the fourteenth-story of the Tech’s Headquarters. The person’s identity has yet to be released, while the family is informed.

Reports came to 911 when a passerby noticed a person lying on the ground near the fifteen-story building at West 15th Street.

A quick response from local authorities transported the man to Bellevue Hospital, but unfortunately, the medical team could not revive him and pronounced him dead.

Law enforcement sources say that handprints were found on the fourteenth-floor terrace, but no suicide note nor video evidence was discovered.

This recent tragedy comes several months after another employee of the same firm, Jacob Pratt, was similarly found dead from an apparent suicide in a residential dwelling in Chelsea near West 26th Street and 6th Avenue.

The devastating news of the Google engineer’s death has substantially impacted those at the firm and throughout the community. This poignant event indicates the integral role mental health awareness and the provision of support for those with suicidal thoughts play in everyday life.

…

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Asset management is an emerging part of the global financial system that has come to prominence since the great meltdown of 2008. Asset managers invest money on behalf of institutional investors — such as sovereign wealth funds, pension schemes, and insurance companies — to generate enormous profits for themselves and their clients. In an asset-manager […]

On Thursday morning, nearly 3,000 public school teachers and support staff in Oakland, California, went on strike. Educators say they’re striking to solve an austerity-driven crisis of understaffing and retention.

Teachers are on strike in Oakland, California. May 5, 2023. (Oakland Education Association / Twitter)

Yesterday morning, nearly three thousand public school educators in Oakland, California, went on strike. The strike by teachers and support staff represented by the Oakland Education Association (OEA) comes after the union reached an impasse in bargaining with the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), following seven months of contract negotiations. The walkout, which covers eighty schools serving thirty-four thousand students, is the union’s second in the last four years after a seven-day strike in 2019.

Teachers say that the district’s schools are suffering from a crisis of understaffing and retention due to low pay — despite Oakland’s higher cost of living, teachers are paid less than their counterparts in surrounding districts. OEA claims that the district is refusing to bargain in good faith over the union’s proposals to improve pay and staffing. Jacobin contributor Michael Sebastian spoke with two teachers about conditions in Oakland public schools, the state of contract negotiations, and why education workers decided to go on strike.

Michael Sebastian

Why is OEA on strike right now?

José Padilla

We are on strike for a number of reasons. One of the big ones is compensation; we want to get to the median compensation for this area. We’re not asking to be the highest-paid district — we’re asking to get us out of the bottom.

Our district just does not spend money on teacher salaries, and if you look around at all the best public school districts, what goes hand in hand with them is the best teacher salaries. That would allow us to not just hire good teachers, but retain good teachers. There’s so many teachers that are leaving the district, because they just can’t afford to keep working here — really good, committed, hardworking teachers.

There’s also what we’re calling “common good demands,” which are trying to work on some of the institutional injustices that our students are up against. Things like school closures, which are racist: they affect mostly black and brown working-class kids more than anyone else. And they are not proven to save any money. [The district] keeps saying that the closures are being done in the name of fiscal responsibility, but when we ask it to show how it saves money, it can’t.

There’s so many teachers that are leaving the district, because they just can’t afford to keep working here.

Other common good demands are things like getting more nurses in our schools, more counselors, and more social workers, so that our students have a bigger safety net. Right now, when a school isn’t able to hire a counselor, so much of that winds up falling on teachers; we’re not trained in that. We work very hard to take those things into account in our curricula and make sure that we are having socially and culturally responsive education for our students, and being empathetic about the challenges that they’re facing. But we’re not trained to help kids work through those feelings and those challenges. They need supports beyond the classroom; they need supports beyond just learning how to read.

But far and away, the biggest demand is compensation. So many teachers are affected by it, from brand-new teachers who are just getting started and trying to pay their rent, to teachers who are working toward retiring and thinking, “I’ve been in this district for twenty years; my salary has been stagnant. I need to go to another higher-paying district if I’m ever going to be able to retire.” It affects us on both ends of the teacher spectrum.

Hilaria Barajas-Barragan

I feel very strongly about common good demands. I feel very strongly about compensation and working conditions, and also just making sure that students have enough caring adults on campus and enough resources. It’s all about, really, the conditions for learning, and making sure that students have what they need to learn — but also our conditions for teaching, making it so that we can teach. I think everything in the contract is super important. But that’s what’s top of mind right now.

Michael Sebastian

What has bargaining been like?

Hilaria Barajas-Barragan

It has been really frustrating and really tiring. We just got out of our bargaining meeting. We were willing and hopeful and excited to bargain after everybody came from the picket lines and was super energized. Then it was really disappointing and frustrating, because right now, the district does not have authority to bargain with us, because it needs to get authority from the school board. And the board has not granted it the authority to do that. So now, it becomes a push to get the board to allow the district to bargain with us. It’s very frustrating that we can’t make any movement until we hear back from the board.

José Padilla

Speaking from my personal experience of having been on the bargaining team during COVID: when we’re bargaining with the district, we’re sending proposals back and forth and editing those proposals with each other. I was asking the bargaining representative from my school, Cassandra, asking her, we’re not adding documents back and forth? [She said] no, what the district has sent is the same thing that they’ve sent to the parents on ParentSquare (a social network for school parents), these fun little graphics that are cute and say, “Oh, look at how much money we’re promising the teachers.”

Oakland teacher José Padilla with his daughter, Salomé, a student at OUSD’s Melrose Leadership Academy. (Zakiya Brooks)

But until that’s in an official proposal, words are wind. It doesn’t mean anything, right? And they’re not doing that. I just keep being in shock. They spend all this time sending these messages . . . and I’m an OUSD parent. So I get that message. I get very frustrated and annoyed, because I know what they’re presenting to the public. Then what my colleagues are telling me is the actual reality.

This is the basis that our strike was started on — the unfair labor practice of the district trying to publicly bargain and not bargain with us at the table. It just keeps on doubling down on it.

Hilaria Barajas-Barragan

It’s not just the district that’s publicly bargaining. It’s the board too, which is sending out messaging that’s just completely untrue. One of the messages on ParentSquare was saying that we were bargaining for seven days and nights with the district. We were doing internal work, and we were waiting for them, but we never had the back and forth, the editing process. That hasn’t happened because we haven’t gotten things in writing.

When they presented the proposal, what we saw on ParentSquare with the rest of the community, they left things out. They said they had a package, and it wasn’t a package; it wasn’t the complete proposal, and we’re not leaving anybody out of our bargaining. It’s just been bad-faith negotiations this whole time.

Something I’ve also been really frustrated about: the first time we met with [OUSD superintendent] Kyla Johnson-Trammell was Sunday night. She came in, met with her team at around 10:00 p.m., but met with the bargaining team after 11:00. It was super frustrating. It just tells me that they’re not taking it seriously, and they didn’t take it seriously. Or they didn’t take it seriously until the strike authorization vote — and now our strike — pushed them.

Michael Sebastian

Hilaria, you said the school board hasn’t allowed the district to negotiate. Why do you think that is?

Hilaria Barajas-Barragan

Yeah, the board has to give power to the OUSD bargaining team to continue bargaining and make decisions around proposals. I think that there’s a power struggle. I think that there are folks on the board who understand what students need and understand what teachers need in order to teach effectively. And in my own personal opinion, there are people on the board who . . . for me, it feels like a power trip. They just know that they have this power, and they know that they can withhold it.

José Padilla

From what I understand, it’s a split vote right down the middle. It’s boggling my mind that some board members are trying as hard as possible to keep absolutely everything in their hands. Allow the district and the union to negotiate with one another!

Michael Sebastian

OEA went on strike in 2019 too, and opposition to school closures was a centerpiece of that strike. Last year, the board voted to consolidate and close eleven schools; but then reversed that in January. How do school closures fit into the strike?

Hilaria Barajas-Barragan

In our common good demands, we have put in language around no school closures.

José Padilla

That was a major piece of the 2019 strike. Even though, in 2019, we weren’t able to stop the school closures that were happening at that time, we were able to get language around a process before closing schools that helped us curb that process in the following year. So that was a big win. It wasn’t enough of a win, but it was a step in the right direction.

That comes to mind for me a lot, because there’s so much wrong with our district right now. It’s not going to get fixed in the next contract. We’re working a long struggle. We’re working a long game, where we need to not just be thinking what’s best for us right now, but also how we set ourselves up for what’s best for us and our working-class community in the years to come. It’s going to continue to be a struggle, because our current district leadership still really wants to close and consolidate schools. We need to keep on fighting and keep on getting every little bit of language to protect those schools that we can.

We need to not just be thinking what’s best for us right now, but also how we set ourselves up for what’s best for us and our working-class community in the years to come.

Hilaria Barajas-Barragan

Right now, all of California is getting money to expand community schools. Oakland in particular is getting the most out of any district in the state. It’s really important for us to put community schools language into our contract, so that people who are on the ground — teachers, students, educators, families — get to make the decision of how to use that money toward authentic community schools. Because we know that if we leave it up to the district, it will just be a bunch of buzzwords.

So we have language in our common good proposal around community schools and shared governance and decision-making. And we want to protect community schools from closures.

Michael Sebastian

What is a community school, exactly?

Hilaria Barajas-Barragan

A community school is a school that engages the whole child. OEA has our own community schools pillars, which include strong, culturally relevant curriculum; high-quality teaching; inclusive, shared leadership; community support services; restorative school culture; family, student, and community engagement; equitable schools; and an effective, accountable school board. I think that the community school money can go toward all of those things.

José Padilla

For OUSD, $66 million was designated for community schools. I’m sure the district would love to spend that money on school consultants — you know, a community schools director with a nice big fat salary at the central offices. That money would not wind up going in the classroom, because that’s their MO; that’s how they operate.

Michael Sebastian

I know OEA has a slogan, “Chop From the Top”; I read that Oakland spends $20 million more on administration than nearby Santa Ana Unified, and Santa Ana has ten thousand more students.

Oakland spends $20 million more on administration than nearby Santa Ana Unified, and Santa Ana has ten thousand more students.

Hilaria Barajas-Barragan

We’re very top-heavy in OUSD.

José Padilla

That’s specifically central admin costs. That does not include principals and secretaries who are at the schools; that admin is centralized office administration. We have a slide from our presentation for parents with a nice little comparison between the Oakland, Santa Ana, and West Contra Costa school districts, and it shows how grossly inflated OUSD’s central administrative offices costs are. We should not have three times as much allotted to that compared to a district with ten thousand more students than us.

A slide from an Oakland Education Association presentation, comparing central administrator pay in Oakland Unified School District to neighboring districts. (Oakland Education Association)

Michael Sebastian

It sounds like Oakland teachers get paid the lowest in Alameda County, and Oakland is not cheap to live in; it’s one of the more expensive places in the Bay Area. How does that affect you all?

José Padilla

Yes, and if it’s not the lowest pay in all of the Bay Area, it’s got to be close to it. I see it affect teacher retention. Not paying people an adequate amount impedes our ability to keep teachers at our schools. That creates really unsettled situations at a lot of our highest-needs schools. For example, the school I was at before, was considered a really good school, but has had a lot of turnover in staff recently, and it has been a challenge.

This year, I’m at a new school, Emerson Elementary, in North Oakland. One of the things that shocked me the most when I started there was that almost every classroom teacher there had been there for several years. There was one brand-new kindergarten teacher who had been a maternity sub the year before; everyone else had been there for several years, some for nine or ten years.

You see the impact that that has on the students. You see how everyone knows each other, how they’re able to share knowledge about the students and community in a way that you can’t when there’s constant turnover. You also see what a huge impact that has on student achievement, as much as I hate the standardized tests. Emerson Elementary has performed fairly well in standardized testing, even though the demographics represent groups that typically score much lower.

In the opinion of my colleagues, that is very much related to the fact that their teachers have been consistently there working with each other. They know how to work together and know how to support one another. What’s typical in OUSD is 20 to 30 percent yearly teacher turnover.

There are some schools that have very little loss, like Emerson, bringing that average up, but then there’s schools that have the entire staff changing over from year to year. That includes the principals, because the principals are getting burnt out like crazy too. And when that is happening . . . Quite frankly, a school like that is not a safe place.

Hilaria Barajas-Barragan

It’s going to be hard for a kid to build a relationship with somebody who then has to leave midyear to go to a different job because they can’t afford to live in the Bay Area anymore. I know that this has happened at at least a few different sites, where people couldn’t finish the year. And students have to do relationship-building again. If students are having a hard time outside of school, and in school they’re having to do this relationship-building again, that’s going to be difficult.

Striking teachers with students and community supporters at Emerson Elementary School in Oakland, California. (Devon King-Neece)

José Padilla

I think it also contributes to a lack of feeling of safety when we don’t have all our positions hired. There are vacancies throughout the year. There might be a class covered by a revolving door of subs, or there’s vacancies so we aren’t fully staffed. For example, as a PE teacher, the kids come to me a little rowdy; there’s sometimes fights that happen. And at my previous school, which had several vacancies, if I had an emergency and needed someone to come right away, that wasn’t guaranteed.

It definitely feels a lot safer for me as a teacher and for my students knowing that, when a student who’s struggling with something is having a moment, having an outburst — maybe it’s directed toward another student, maybe it’s not, but they need some sort of support — knowing that someone will actually come when I pick up the radio and say, “I need support,” that is huge. And that’s not guaranteed. There are so many teachers who are like, “I could be on the radio all day saying, ‘There’s a fight over here,’ and no one’s coming.”

Hilaria Barajas-Barragan

That speaks to the need for mental health support and mental health services for students. And that’s part of the common good demands: making sure that students have enough restorative justice coordinators, enough mental health providers, enough counselors.

José Padilla

We had our students making their ideal schools in conversations around the strike — asking, “What’s your ideal school like?” And it’s simple things, like “We need AC in this classroom”; like “I can’t focus when it’s too hot,” or “We need shade. There’s no shade on our playground, and we’re struggling out there.” The Bay Area, once it gets eighty degrees out, they’re melting.

Michael Sebastian

What was it like getting organized for the strike?

Hilaria Barajas-Barragan

On the bargaining end, we know that striking is such a big ask, and we know that it’s not something that anybody takes lightly — people are not getting paid right now. Once we win our salary proposal, we can get retro pay, and hopefully that will help. But still, it’s a hard time, and students can’t go to the classroom, and it’s not something we take lightly at all.

At my site, I feel very lucky that we have folks who have been there for a while, so this is not their first strike. They know how to do this, because they know the district’s antics. They’re like, “We have our strike captain,” different people are signing up for different roles, people are reaching out to non-OEA members on campus and talking to them. We’re communicating with families and sending out messages, trying to connect people with resources that they need, like if they need food, or if certain families can take care of other families’ kids . . . just doing a lot of connecting. It’s a lot of work at the site-by-site level.

José Padilla

The 2019 strike had a much bigger windup period. But for this strike, there are way more veteran strikers who are familiar with what needed to happen, and we were able to do it on a much quicker turnaround. People were concerned about having less time to plan and organize it, but you don’t need a perfect strike. You just need an impactful strike.

There had been a general buzz of, “Do you think we’ll need to go on strike?” Also, once those offers from the district were coming out, 3.5 percent raises that were actually pay cuts because they were tied to more work — people might not have wanted to strike, but everyone was ready to strike. We did our outreach, we were doing temperature checks, and folks were just like, “We’re down. We’re ready for this.” And once everyone is committed, it’s going to happen, and it’s going to be effective.

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