Month: March 2022

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SCUSD Teachers and Staff Strike

Brian Laird, a West Campus teacher, holds up signs during the strike. Photo credit: Eleanor Love
Brian Laird, a West Campus teacher, holds up signs during the strike. Photo credit: Brandon Chan

By Eleanor Love, News and Sports Editor and Izzie Kim, Editor-in-Chief

On Wednesday, March 23, Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) teachers and staff officially took to the picket line. Many wore red and hoisted posters and signs as they marched up and down the street in front of their schools. 

Later that morning, they relocated to gather outside of the Serna Center. Hundreds of teachers and staff walked along the street, and others collected in the parking lot. Students, families, and community members showed up as well. Passing cars honked in support while strikers played music, shook cow bells, and chanted.

The strike was a culmination of disagreements between the Sacramento City Teachers Association (SCTA) and SCUSD. Teachers and staff say they’re angry over a staffing crisis and the district’s proposed changes to their contract (which include benefit cuts, wage cuts, and wage freezes). The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents all non-teacher staff, went on strike with the SCTA.

“There is no reason that the strike needed to happen. The district had days to come to the table to work with us and the SEIU to resolve these problems,” said Nikki Milevsky, Vice President of the SCTA. 

Teachers hold “Staff Our Schools” signs at the strike. Photo credit: Eleanor Love

On March 17, an independent fact finder’s report was released as a result of a fact finding process requested by the district in December 2021. The process sought to help resolve issues between the two parties. The fact finder’s recommendations largely supported the SCTA’s stances, and the SCTA quickly concurred with the recommendations. The district did not concur, and after negotiations on Monday and Tuesday, no agreement was met. 

“We assumed they would concur with the report they asked to have happen, and they did not. They dissented and refused to accept their fact finder’s report,” Milevsky explained.

Milevsky and other union leadership also highlighted that 10,000 students in the district have had an uncertified instructor leading their classes for at least part of the 2021-2022 school year. SCUSD’s official website reports that over 40,000 students attend SCUSD schools – if both of these numbers are accurate, about a quarter of students have experienced this. 

In an interview conducted by local news station ABC10, SCUSD Superintendent Jorge Aguilar explained “This is certainly not something that’s ideal for our community and I recognize it and I just hope that we can bring back our students.”

The Prospector also requested comment from SCUSD officials at the Serna Center, but none were available at the site.

Standing on a makeshift stage in the parking lot of the Serna Center, surrounded by union leadership as well as students, SCTA President David Fisher rallied the crowd: “We didn’t choose this fight. But we’re gonna finish it,” he said.

Many chants from the crowd centered around Aguilar’s recent pay raises: a 34,000-dollar raise in March 2020 and an increase in benefits in December 2021.

“He should be taking a pay cut, not you,” said Fisher.

Teachers and staff march outside of the Serna Center. Photo credit: Eleanor Love

On Tuesday, March 22, the United Professional Educators (UPE), which represents school administrators, issued a pages-long letter to Aguilar and Board of Education members. “We have lost confidence in the District’s ability to provide effective leadership,” it reads. 

UPE’s indication of no confidence is in addition to SCTA and SEIU’s votes of no confidence.

Members from the National Education Association (NEA) and California Teachers Association (CTA) also offered support to teachers and staff. 

NEA Vice President Princess Moss joined the stage today, asserting that “Teachers and educators must unite because public education is a human right. When public education is under attack, we must stand up and fight back.” 

“What the union is asking for really isn’t extraordinary. The district has these funds from the American Rescue Plan and the governor,” Moss said. 

Teachers and staff plan to continue their strike. Wednesday evening, C.K. McClatchy Principal Andrea Egan sent out an email to parents and students stating that schools will be closed again on Thursday and for the duration of the strike. Meals will be available for pickup at the school from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.

Tomorrow, after striking at their respective schools from 8 to 10 a.m., teachers and staff intend to gather outside of the Sacramento County Office of Education. On Friday, they plan to march in front of Sacramento City Hall and Cesar Chavez Plaza.

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Archive News

SCTA Hosts Rally Outside School Board Meeting with Official Strike Day Approaching

Teachers and staff hold posters and march outside of the district board meeting at the Serna Center.
Teachers and staff hold posters and march outside of the district board meeting at the Serna Center. Photo Credit: Brandon Chan

By Brandon Chan, Staff Writer

On Thursday March 17, the Sacramento City Teachers Association (SCTA) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) hosted a rally outside of SCUSD’s school board meeting at the Serna Center. Hundreds of teachers and staff, most clad in “Red for Ed” shirts, held posters, chanted, and gathered outside of the Center. Many SCUSD students and families also attended to demonstrate support. 

This rally follows the SCTA and SEIU’s vote last Friday to authorize a strike. Teachers and staff alike say they’re frustrated over an ongoing staffing crisis, the district’s approach to independent study, and the district’s proposed changes to their contract which include wage cuts, benefit changes, and work day hours. 

The rally aimed to raise awareness about this conflict and unite the community. At the event, SCTA President David Fisher confirmed that a teacher’s strike will occur on Wednesday, March 23. 

Credit: Brandon Chan

Teachers, staff, and supporters alike shared the same sentiment: they want the best conditions for students. 

“We’re fighting for students, we’re fighting for their teachers and their classrooms, we’re fighting for buses and their bus drivers, we’re fighting for counselors, we’re fighting for services for the students,” Fisher asserted.

Peter Hart, a special education teacher at Fern Bacon Middle School, also explained his frustration with the district. “How can a student learn when all they get are substitutes, day in day out, when the district cannot retain good teachers? They keep trying to gut and cut programs that are beneficial to the students.” 

Mara Harvey, a mother of two SCUSD students agreed. “We as parents want to see teachers in every single classroom. We want teachers to educate our children.”

The Prospector requested comment at the Serna Center from Superintendent Jorge Aguilar, Board of Education member Lisa Murawski, and Communications Manager Alexander Goldberg. However, none were available. 

Earlier today, SCUSD held a press conference on the State of Labor negotiations. The district acknowledged its struggles with financial balancing and stated that its concern is equally focused on its teachers, staff, and students. In the conference, the district also commended the school board for taking fiscally sound steps in correcting budget imbalances last year.

“We need contracts that provide certainty in the short-term, and the long-term that factor in the need for fair and competitive total compensation for our staff,” SCUSD explained. “We ask that instead of striking, our labor partners go back to the bargaining table. We stand in support of our district community.”

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Archive News

SCTA Votes to Authorize Strike with Rally at Serna Center Approaching

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. 

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Archive Opinion Technology

Why NFTs Won’t Work

By Tristan Olynick, Staff Writer

Over the past year, NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) have come into the view of the mainstream media and have come into controversy. The biggest reason why these internet keys have become controversial is because simply, they do not work. Many people believe that these may change the way we use the internet, yet NFTs are stupid technically and ideally. 

A big problem is that NFTs are artificially inflated. This inflation comes from the practice that a lot of top tier NFT owners use called “wash trading”. This happens when the owner of an NFT will buy his own NFT with a different crypto wallet. These purchases are traceable through viewing a wallet’s history. 

The purpose of wash trading is to artificially drive up the price of these images to an unreasonable number, causing people to think that it’s worth more than it really is. It also puts on the act to potential buyers that it is highly tradeable, causing higher chances for profit returns.

A lot of this wash trading is discovered by places such as “Chainanalysis” which “Connects cryptocurrency transactions to real-world activity.” According to Chainanalysis, there were 25 NFTs discovered under wash trading that made over 8.9 million dollars in ETH (Ethereum) which is an online currency.

A key argument you may have heard thrown around about NFTs changing the game may be in video games, which claim that you can buy an NFT and use it in one game, and then use it in another. A quote from American singer Mike Shinoda, “Imagine taking your favorite skin from Valorant, and using it [in] Fortnite. And not paying extra, because you won it. Then using it in CoD, Minecraft, even Twitter, IG.” This is practically impossible.

On January 9, 3D character artist Xavier Coelho-Kostolny created a thread on twitter explaining why Mike Shinoda’s vision is impractical. When reviewing the thread, one point jumps out clearly. It is irreconcilable to jump from one art style to another; specifically based on rendering technology.

Rendering technology is complicated, there is no same way of rendering things. Many games use vastly different “engines” that drive this rendering for objects, effects, backgrounds, and more in these games. While Valorant renders their game through one engine, Minecraft will render objects in not only a different, but different code. This creates a very important limitation that many seem to overlook. 

Due to this change in code and rendering engines, each and every NFT would need to be converted to every single engine imaginable, including ones made by smaller companies which might not even support this conversion. To render an NFT in Valorant you have to give specific instructions and rules to draw this NFT to one’s monitor. Using that same NFT in another game such as Minecraft would break it entirely because they both use completely different sets of instructions to draw objects.

When you look at the server side of things, it gets even worse. If NFTs were to take full effect there would possibly be millions of them. All of them (to even be identified by the platform you are using such as Instagram) would have to be placed on a centralized hub where the platform can pull information from. The platform then needs to spend multiple CPU cycles to verify it is yours and cannot be duplicated, this would slow down server performance immensely rendering them almost useless.

To actually accomplish Shinoda’s dream, Xavier explains that it would cost an unfathomable amount of money with legal issues, conversion work, having to remodel it to fit with the games art style, and performance cost. It simply isn’t worth the work, and many believe it would completely kill the NFT market.

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Archive Entertainment

The Book of Boba Fett: Weaker than the Sum of its Parts

By Jackson Wedel, Staff Writer

Making a show about Boba Fett would have been a difficult task no matter the circumstances. The Star Wars character became such a fan favorite not because of his deep characterization or interesting connection to the storyline, but because he simply has a cool design. In fact, in the original Star Wars trilogy, Boba has exactly four lines of dialogue: hardly something that could make for an engaging protagonist. 

A show like Disney+’s The Book of Boba Fett, centering on the iconic bounty hunter, had to simultaneously live up to the character’s legendary reputation while also inventing a personality that never existed in the first place.

The series picks up where the second season of The Mandalorian left off: Boba Fett (played by Temuera Morrison), along with his fellow bounty hunter Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen), attempts to become the new reigning crime lord on the planet Tatooine. Intermittent flashbacks depict how Boba survived his apparent demise in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, revealing how the hardships he faced forced him to evolve as a human being.

On paper, this sounds like a genuinely compelling concept for a Boba Fett series. Depicting Boba as a burgeoning crime lord allows him to genuinely struggle as a character in a way that portraying him in his element as a talented bounty hunter would never allow for. Moreover, it has the added benefit of distinguishing the show’s premise from that of The Mandalorian, which follows a very similar stoic armored bounty hunter. Meanwhile, the flashbacks not only provide a much-needed follow-up to Boba’s last movie appearance, but also allows him to develop as a character, giving him the necessary emotional range to lead a series.

Moreover, the show does tap into some of this potential. Boba Fett finally feels vaguely like a human being, rather than a glorified action figure, thanks to the powerful character development he undergoes here. Although the present-day storyline is messier, it is still packed with entertaining moments that fully embrace the character’s origins as a “space cowboy” archetype. In particular, I thought it handled fanservice exceptionally well: while characters from other Star Wars shows and even comics appeared, they were usually handled in a manner that contributed to the tone of the series and that could still be appreciated even if you didn’t know their origins.

Unfortunately, the structure of the show leaves something to be desired. While the flashbacks provide a solid narrative connection to Boba’s character development, they are incredibly uneven: some episodes center almost entirely on flashbacks, while others rarely feature them. Meanwhile, the crime lord plotline feels jerky and stilted: there isn’t enough of a central conflict to drive these sequences until the third or fourth episode, and the somewhat disjointed nature of the series leaves every episode feeling disconnected from the others, forcing the series to tie absolutely everything together in its admittedly entertaining finale.

The most egregious instance of the show’s structure actively sabotaging itself comes with its fifth and sixth episodes. These episodes focus on a completely different character, whose journey is not relevant at all to Boba’s storylines. In fact, Boba Fett, the protagonist and titular character of the series, does not appear at all in his show’s fifth episode, and has a very minimal presence in the sixth. To be perfectly fair to these episodes, they are absolutely fantastic pieces of standalone Star Wars media. But as episodes of The Book of Boba Fett, they are frankly incomprehensible. While a “side story” like this might be excusable in a long-running show, Boba Fett only has seven episodes, meaning that almost 30% of the series completely sidelines its protagonist.

Because the show spends so much time on completely unrelated storylines, it feels like the narrative lacks the space it needs to grow and develop. While lots of compelling storylines are introduced and set up, most of them are simply not fleshed-out enough – something that those two “wasted” episodes could have easily been better used for. 

For instance, the series flirts with the idea that in order to fully redeem himself, Boba must face and fully reject his unscrupulous past. However, that concept is primarily established through other characters talking about Boba – he is never actually given the time to reflect on those aspects of himself, turning an otherwise-interesting character beat into an afterthought.

Thankfully, and as expected from Star Wars, the technical elements of the show are all top-notch. Even though individual episodes have far lower budgets than a full movie would, the special effects all feel realistic and well-integrated into the world. The set design, too, is a strong point, perfectly replicating the aesthetic of Tatooine from the original Star Wars movies while simultaneously expanding upon it. 

Finally, the score, written by Mandalorian composer Ludwig Göransson, is phenomenal, once again abandoning Star Wars’ traditionally orchestral soundtrack in favor of the more modern sound that made The Mandalorian stand out as a “new era”.

Ultimately, while The Book of Boba Fett is certainly not a bad show, it could have been so much stronger than what it ended up as. It seems like all the building blocks necessary to make a strong Boba Fett series were in place, but they simply lacked the necessary narrative and thematic ties to bring them all together into one cohesive whole. The show’s end result is a rather messy, but enjoyable jumble of ideas that never seem to build on each other. 

Perhaps it was inevitable that a show centered around such an empty character would likewise be a little messy, but it is nevertheless slightly disappointing that it was so close to being a great series.