By Antonia Montes

Above: Eastman Avenue Elementary educators ready to canvass the neighborhood to recruit students to their school.

Eastman Avenue Elementary School in Boyle Heights won a long-fought battle to end Extera Charter School’s co-location on their campus this school year. Our victory did not happen overnight. It was the result of years of strategic organizing, persistence, and collaboration among teachers, parents, and community members. Our fight against Extera’s co-location was organized on two fronts. The first focused on student retention at Eastman. This included strengthening Eastman and encouraging families to keep their children enrolled at Eastman rather than enrolling them at Extera. The second focused on organizing to end Extera’s co-location at Eastman. Combined, these strategies allowed us to prevent Extera enrollment growth and build the collective power needed to reclaim our campus from corporate outsiders.

Prior to Extera co-locating at Eastman, Extera had already co-located at three schools in Boyle Heights. Extera was founded by Tom Strickler, a retired co-founder of Endeavor Talent Agency in Beverly Hills. Between 2011 and 2013, with the support of former pro-charter LAUSD Board Member Monica Garcia and significant funding for advertising and expansion, Extera aggressively grew to three co-locations. In the spring of 2018, Extera began enrolling students on the Eastman campus.

The first strategy was to slow down Extera expansion to prevent the loss of Eastman teachers and classrooms. As Eastman teachers, we organized to reach out directly to the community. We partnered with local Catholic churches to make recruitment announcements and passed out flyers after Mass, highlighting the opportunities available at Eastman. Working with our former principal, we offered early registration for Pre-K, TK, and kindergarten, along with Saturday workshops where teachers provided families with hands-on reading, math, and science activities. Eight teachers staffed different learning stations. We promoted our 20 after-school enrichment clubs and highlighted the expertise of our teachers and staff through recruitment flyers. Teachers also raised $2,500 to professionally produce a promotional video for the school.  

We also attended Boyle Heights farmers markets and facilitated for our students to participate in the East Los Angeles Independence Day Parade and Boyle Heights Christmas parades. We canvassed local parks and held a booth at East LA community events to promote Eastman and build relationships with families. Our strategy was working, preventing Extera’s expansion. We successfully protected every teaching position; no Eastman teacher was ever displaced because of the co-location.

The other strategy, led by Eastman parents and Eastman Parent Center community representative Rachel Jurado was to end Extera’s co-location at Eastman. The Parent Center became the hub for developing parent leaders and bringing teachers and parents together to strategize. With support from UTLA Parent and Community Organizer Ilse Escobar and Eastside Padres Contra la Privatización, nearly 100 parents, teachers, students, and community members marched on an Extera board meeting and parents shut the meeting down. This action galvanized our movement.

We also held press conferences at LAUSD headquarters, spoke at LAUSD Board meetings about the negative impact of co-location, and joined ACCE in Sacramento to advocate for stronger charter accountability. In Sacramento, Eastman parents demanded a meeting with then-State Assembly Member Wendy Carrillo and occupied her office until her chief of staff met with us. Through these actions, we secured a meeting with Carrillo, who later visited Eastman, where student representatives from each student club spoke with her. After a press conference outside LAUSD headquarters, we also secured a meeting with Monica Garcia at Eastman, where parents packed the auditorium to voice their anger over the co-location. Although neither Carrillo nor Garcia took action to help us, they saw the growing power of Eastman’s fight against Extera. Through social media, press coverage, and community organizing, we began challenging the pro-charter narrative in East Los Angeles and building greater support for neighborhood public schools.

The beauty of our struggle was the powerful relationships we built between parents and teachers beyond the classroom. These bonds will last a lifetime. Although I am no longer at Eastman, they will always be my family. We will always carry this victory, the lessons we learned, and the collective power we built together into the next fight. 

The other biggest takeaway from our victory is that organizing works. The Eastman community has a long history of parent leadership that has been passed on through generations. Eastman teachers have a long history of fighting for our school. Building on this history, we took our organizing to the next level by fighting on multiple fronts, forming community partnerships, and keeping the pressure on through protests, press conferences, media, and advocacy. We did not win because of one action or one leader. We won because as parents, teachers, students, and community members, we built people power together, stayed organized, and refused to give up.

Now we’re using our collective power to prevent the monstrosity of Lineage Logistics from rebuilding in Boyle Heights after its devastating fire this past summer and the hazardous aftermath on our communities of Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, and surrounding communities.