CFT United

LOCAL 61 
Magic can’t pay the rent…With the average price of a house over one million dollars, San Francisco is the most expensive real estate market in the nation.

Delegates overwhelmingly cast their votes for CFT President Joshua Pechthalt, who won 93 percent of the vote in a contested election. Secretary Treasurer Jeff Freitas was reelected by acclamation.

In April 2013, a few months after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that killed 20 children and six adult staff members, the board of California State Teachers’ Retirement System voted to divest from firms making weapons that are illegal to own in California. More than two years later, that hasn’t happened, and Joshua Pechthalt, president of the CFT, wants to make sure it does. Soon.

Laura Rico has worked in education for more than 40 years, starting as an early childhood teacher at the Artesia High School Children’s Center in the 1970s where she became a member of the ABC Federation of Teachers.

Member organizers from local unions throughout the state joined forces at Palomar College to meet one-on-one with part-time faculty agency fee payers who had not yet signed their union cards — and asked them to join the union.

Delegates took on social justice concerns, passing a resolution from the United Educators of San Francisco and the CFT Executive Council to officially support the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Resolution 23 calls for community meetings, teach-ins and curricula, such as what’s already posted on UESF’s website and AFT’s Share My Lesson.

Angel Neri described the unique education given students at the Raul Isidro Burgos School in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, in his speech at CFT Convention. The school takes students from rural farming communities, trains them as teachers, and then encourages them to return to work in schools in the poorest, most remote communities in Mexico. This has earned the school the enmity of corrupt and violent elements of Mexican society.

Jeff Duncan-Andrade grew up in Oakland, the youngest of seven children. He remembers one day when his mother sat him down, showed him a glass of water, and asked him if it was half full or half empty.

Lobby Day focuses on community schools, charter schools, accreditation

On April 21, educators fanned out in the Capitol to talk directly to their legislators about what really happens at school and the need to pass priority bills.

Lab techs. Secretaries. Bus drivers. Groundskeepers. Food service workers. The varied hats classified staff members wear cover a multitude of job roles, said Carl Williams, a senior custodian and president of the Lawndale Federation of Classified Employees. He had members pick up a hat and come on stage when they heard their job title called out.

By Josh Pechthalt, CFT President

California’s largest, oldest corporations have not been paying their fair share for more than 35 years. As a result, the state has lost billions of dollars in uncollected property tax revenues — a major factor pushing our public schools to the national bottom in per pupil spending and class size average. The state’s most at-risk families and individuals have also seen essential services repeatedly cut for more than a generation.