Category: Archive

By Brandon Chan, Staff Writer and Eleanor Love, News and Sports Editor

On March 8th, the Sacramento City Teachers Association (SCTA) voted to authorize a strike as a result of the Sacramento City Unified School District’s (SCUSD’s) proposed plan to cut health benefits, staff positions, no defined workday, and other district rights. The SCTA vote was 95 percent in support of the authorization.

The vote took place from March 8 to March 10. The Service Employee International Union (SEIU), which covers all non-educational staff in the district, voted 97 percent in favor of the authorization as well. While this vote does not directly trigger a strike, it allows union leaders to call a strike in the future if they see fit. 

According to the SCTA, the primary motivation for this vote revolves around a staffing crisis in the district. In 2019, SCUSD unveiled a contract proposal that has gone unchanged since. The proposal includes the district’s right to change health insurance benefits at any time, a five year freeze on teacher wages, wage cuts, staff position cuts, and additional teacher meetings without compensation. The proposal also introduces the right to oversee the hiring of new staff without existing staff input and an increase in class size maximums, among other measures. 

Nate Starace, one of C.K. McClatchy’s union representatives, explained that “In a way it ‘de-professionalizes’ teaching. It takes away a lot of autonomy that teachers have. It shows new teachers looking for a place to teach that teachers are not seen as professionals that understand what they’re doing and that they need to be completely managed by the district office.”

The SCTA claims that the proposal would worsen staff shortages and create a deeper staffing crisis in the district. According to the association, the union has communicated this concern to the district in every bargaining session since 2019. When the COVID-19 pandemic began in spring of 2020, the staffing crisis grew even worse. 

“Why would a new teacher come here when they can make more in another school district? The job’s hard enough. It’s not a way to attract new teachers,” added Starace.

Despite receiving federal funding over the duration of the pandemic and reports that the district has more funding now than at any time of its history, teachers and staff say little funding has been directed at addressing staffing shortages. The authorization to strike is a culmination of this conflict. But the district and SCTA are even at odds over where they’re at an impasse. 

The Prospector reached out to C.K. McClatchy’s board of education member Lisa Murawski for comment but received no reply. Additionally, when asked to comment, district communications manager Alexander Goldberg responded with a link to Superintendent Jorge Aguilar’s March 9 press release. 

In his statement, Aguilar asserted that SCUSD and SCTA were dealing with two separate negotiations: one over school reopening plans related to COVID and the other involving the successor contract negotiations. “The district and SCTA have both acknowledged that we are not at impasse over successor contract negotiations,” the statement reads. 

Aguilar added that “it is unconscionable that SCTA is threatening a strike,” asserting that “it is offensive to all of our families that have been waiting for their children’s school experience to get back to normal.”

SCTA’s stance, however, is that the staffing shortage experienced during the COVID pandemic is not temporary. It believes that the contract proposal would further worsen the situation. The SCTA claims that it never separated these two negotiations issues. 

In response to Aguilar’s message, SCTA stated “The district is now unsuccessfully trying to claim that the issues are limited only to its own, narrowly-focused proposals. The district appears to be arguing that only its proposals should be considered, while ignoring the fact that SCTA has made its own set of proposals to resolve the issues.” 

On March 17, SCTA will hold a rally outside of the Serna Center at 4 p.m., where the next district board meeting will be held. The rally aims to show widespread community support for teachers and staff members.

After the board meeting, the bargaining teams of both unions will meet and discuss future steps. 

By Jaida Cohen, Staff Writer

In Sacramento, 195 homeless people died last year with the winter season being the deadliest, according to an analysis by the Sacramento Bee. The previous year, 137 died with the winter season being the deadliest. Anti-homeless architecture poses additional challenges for homeless citizens who already face numerous hardships and unsafe conditions. 

Homelessness has long been a problem in Sacramento. According to the California Globe, over 11,000 people were experiencing homelessness in Sacramento as of November 2021. 

Last year Mayor Darrell Steinberg released an ambitious proposal to build 20 new shelter sites, which would serve about 3,600 people total. In August the Sacramento City Council unanimously decided to move forward with the plan, allotting $100 million to fund it over the next two years. 

Despite Steinberg’s efforts, many homeless residents often feel safer sleeping in a public space like an underpass or park than in a shelter. However, anti-homeless architectural designs force them to seek different places to sleep and rest. Attitudes toward the architecture are mixed, but ultimately all homeless residents are affected, especially during the winter season. 

“Our downtown has incorporated hostile designs and practices, such as removing benches outside the library, erecting fencing to keep people out of alcoves, turning off all the water faucets, turning on sprinklers at odd hours at parks – just some examples to discourage homeless people and loitering,” said Paula Lomazzi, the director of Sacramento’s Homeward Street Journal. 

“What they have done affects everyone, making downtown uncomfortable for everyone, including shoppers,” she added.

But many Sacramentans are working to advocate for the homeless, like Bob Erlenbusch, the founder and executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness (SRCEH). His organization seeks “to end and prevent homelessness in the Sacramento region through policy analysis, community education, civic engagement, collective organizing and advocacy.” 

When asked if he thinks that anti-homeless architecture harms the safety of homeless people, Erlenbusch said “Yes. It harms their safety because it reduces the safe places they can be – a well lit park, a well lit street, lots of car and foot traffic, and forces them into more isolated and darker places that are unsafe.” 

“The community is sending the message ‘you are unwanted.’ It architecturally enshrines ‘not in my backyard,’” he explained.

Erlenbusch believes that instead of just focusing on the winter season, Sacramento needs year-round shelter, affordable and accessible housing, and support to provide to its homeless residents. 

Sacramento County has over 1,000 unaccompanied homeless teenagers, with 40 percent being LGBTQ+ youth who were kicked out of their home. High schoolers can help Sacramento’s homeless by working with homeless youth programs like Wind and Walking the Village, organizations that operate under the Homeless Youth Advocacy Coalition.

By Jackson Wedel, Staff Writer

January 6, 2022 marks the one year anniversary of the 2021 Capitol insurrection, where an enormous mob of thousands of former president Donald Trump’s supporters burst into the Capitol building demanding that the results of the 2020 presidential election be overturned.

For months after the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and his supporters falsely asserted that Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate. This came to a head on January 6: the day Biden’s victory in the Electoral College was set to be certified by Congress. The year following the insurrection was filled with investigations into the event, including hearings of top Trump campaign officials and criminal charges of over 700 rioters.

To mark the anniversary, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris gave a speech at the U.S. Capitol about the insurrection and the threat to democracy it embodied. 

“You can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t obey the law only when it’s convenient. You can’t be patriotic when you embrace and enable lies,” Biden argued, condemning the rioters of the 6th. He criticized Trump’s conduct after the election, though never by name: “Because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our constitution, he can’t accept he lost.” 

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi also planned a series of events surrounding the day, including a moment of silence in the House of Representatives and a prayer at the Capitol Building.

Public opinions about American democracy are at an all-time low. According to a Pew Research Center poll, approximately 85% of Americans believe that their political system either needs to be completely reformed or needs major changes. Over the past year, American democracy has remained under fire with the passage of new laws in 19 states restricting voting rights. These laws, which play into Trump’s false “election fraud” narrative, limit the ways that America’s underserved communities can engage with its government. 

However, Congress has introduced two key bills in the past year that aim to reverse attacks on democracy: the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. The Freedom to Vote Act would mandate the likes of early voting and mail-in voting nationwide, and would outlaw discriminatory practices like disenfranchising felons and spreading misinformation. The John Lewis Voting Rights Act resurrects a Civil Rights Movement-era policy preventing regions with histories of discriminatory voting regulations from passing further restrictions without Congressional consent.

Various government groups – especially the House of Representatives’ January 6 Select Committee – have been working to uncover the full story behind the insurrection. Text messages from Trump allies Sean Hannity and Mark Meadows have been revealed which  indicate that they had some prior knowledge of the January 6 insurrection. Most recently, a witness testimony claimed Trump was watching the insurrection live for hours before encouraging his supporters to leave the Capitol. 

Attorney General Merrick Garland and the U.S. Department of Justice have played a key role in the January 6th investigation. They have been seeking out and pressing charges against individuals involved in the insurrection, though specific details of their investigation procedures remain confidential. “The actions we have taken thus far will not be our last. The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law—whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy,” Garland asserted during a speech yesterday.

Still, efforts to reveal the full truth behind the insurrection face a long road ahead. While about 700 indictments have been made thus far, most estimates assert that there were around 10,000 people present at the Trump rally that day.

Donald Trump had originally prepared to give his own press conference the night of January 6, though he gave no confirmation that he planned to speak about the 2021 Capitol insurrection. However, this announcement drew ire from Democrats and Republicans alike, who argued the conference would be harmful. Trump later cancelled this news conference, postponing it to January 15.

Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who has come under fire over the past year for his alleged role in organizing the January 6 insurrection and was indicted for contempt of Congress, is hosting a special edition of his podcast on the anniversary. Joining him are Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene – two of the most fervently pro-Trump representatives in the country. Bannon made a controversial decision to host Darren Beattie, a former Trump speechwriter who previously met with white nationalists and has promoted baseless conspiracy theories that the January 6 rioters were not actually Trump supporters.

Despite the threat to democracy the insurrection faced and further attacks on voting rights that have occurred, Biden shared a message of hope in his speech. “Our democracy held. We the people endured. We the people prevailed,” he said.