I have taught in southeast San Diego, in the proud Chollas View neighborhood, for nearly 30 years. I’ve hunkered down in the cafeteria during lockdowns. I’ve fought for equitable opportunities for my students and children, opportunities that I had aplenty as a kid myself.
I’ve attended rallies against the closure of programs from sports, music, theater, libraries to you name it. I’ve pushed back on administrators wielding test score charts during No Child Left Behind.
And I thought I had seen it all.
But this year, unlike any other, I have seen attacks against my school, against my students, and against the families I serve, coming in strange new forms. Particularly, I have seen what the federal government is doing to schools like mine by withholding funds meant for programs and services my school relies on.
As Richard Berrera, vice president of the San Diego Unified School District board, recently told KUSI News, “Many of these programs have actually been approved by the Congress, but then the administration just holds the funding. And what we’re not seeing is a Congress willing to stand up and say enough. That’s wrong.”
I agree with Trustee Berrera. And for me, it’s become personal.
I now talk with families in the Chollas View area who pick their children up from a school over a mile away, because they fear they could be the target of an ICE raid. I have had to comfort students outside my classroom, students worried about their families being “taken away,” worried that teachers like me might think they eat “cats and dogs.” On a boat last year, I had to calm a parent who thought our annual whale watching trip might be a plot to take her and her family back to Haiti.
And then there’s the funding.
I know of special education support staff members who do not know if their positions will be funded in future years. I know of general education classrooms where many students are constantly on the verge of losing the support that compliance to the law necessitates. And I know that because school districts like ours can’t trust we’ll have money we depend on, the teachers in these rooms will have to perform even more miracles than they already do, alone.
This is why the Voice of San Diego’s education reporter called our middle school sports program an experiment recently. Because we don’t know if we can keep funding it in this climate.
This is why NBC News says we are getting rid of middle schools in some low socio-economic neighborhoods in San Diego. Because we don’t know if we can fund programs in some neighborhoods when Title 1 funding may no longer exist.
Today, I know teachers who can’t be trained on new curriculum, because the funding was cut. I know student teachers who must choose to be substitute teachers for years, or work for a charter school for much lower pay. I know of teachers afraid to teach units of instruction they’ve used for decades. I know of educational leadership programs that benefit various children of proud ethnic groups in our great city that are no longer meeting because of the new federal Department of Education’s mandate against DEI.
I know of teachers denied access to grants, programs, and positions because of wording in their proposals and applications that a year ago were universally regarded as equitable.
As a teacher of many years, I know that the public right now has heard the rhetoric out there. I’ve read the claims of indoctrination, of kitty litter boxes, of the supposed controversy over using preferred pronouns in class. But as a teacher, I also know that these headlines are catchy, that these claims are misleading or minuscule, and that these claims are all too often exaggerated to make their intended audience upset.
What isn’t minuscule is the fact that over 87% of Californians trust public schools to educate their children. In the U.S. as a whole, over 92% do.
I know that strong public schools are the core foundation of our democracy, in San Diego, in California, and in the United States. As a teacher who has spent years in classrooms outside the U.S. as well, I know that strengthening public schools raises stronger nations, and destroying public schools will have an opposite effect.
For that reason alone, but also for what all of my great students and families deserve, I support the redistricting effort of Proposition 50, as a response to the unprecedented efforts by the Trump administration to gain congressional seats in Texas. Public schools, like our very electorate, are under attack in a way I have never seen in my lifetime, like I have never seen in my career.
And it’s time to call this what it is. This is an effort to take away our nation’s democratic core, a core that begins with the young people of our nation who learn to understand their world in the very place that accepts all, that teaches all, that excludes none, that allows for freedom of thought to begin with.
Berrera, and the entire San Diego Unified board of trustees, are not alone in their support of Prop. 50. As a proud former SDUSD District Teacher of the Year, and as a vice chair of the Exemplary Teacher Advisory Council, I stand with them.
Stand with us and defend our public schools from this unprecedented assault on the families we proudly serve.
Vote “yes” on Prop. 50.
Thomas Courtney is a former SDUSD District Teacher of the Year, and the proud Millennial Tech Middle School teacher of the year in 2024. He serves as the vice chair of the Exemplary Teacher Advisory Council of San Diego.
