Fighting for Black Students & Educational Equity: BSAP at 5

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In 2020, youth from Students Deserve & BLM-LA - inspired by uprisings for George Floyd - brought UTLA & community to demand LAUSD divest $25 million from school police and create the Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP). As fascism, pol-ICE and attacks on “DEI” and education escalate, come discuss the fight to protect BSAP & more.

Panel leader: Joseph Williams is the Executive Director of Students Deserve, a youth-centered organization working to smash the School-to-Prison-Pipeline, end youth incarceration, and make Black Lives Matter in schools. In his childhood, he experienced and overcame poverty, family instability, homelessness, group homes, school push out, incarceration, and more. Joseph has organized at the intersections of racial, social, economic, and educational justice for well over a decade, helping to lead campaigns that have unionized hundreds of working class folks, divested over $100 million from police, and invested hundreds of millions into resources and supports for Black youth and other racialized and marginalized communities.

Cecily Myart-Cruz, UTLA President, is a teacher, activist, and the first woman of color in UTLA’s history to serve as president of the union. Cecily has been an educator for 28 years, at both elementary and middle school levels, most recently at Angeles Mesa Elementary. Before being elected UTLA President, Cecily served as UTLA West Area Chair and NEA Vice President. As Area chair, she organized boycotts of over-testing and worked with the community, parents, students, and educators to demand collaborative administrators centering the health and well-being of school sites. 

Georgia Flowers-Lee has been an educator with the Los Angeles Unified School District for 22 years. Born in Belize, Georgia moved to New York with her family at age 13 and then to Los Angeles, where she attended LAUSD schools Berendo Junior High and North Hollywood High School. Teaching is a second career for Georgia, who spent 12 years as an investigator with the California State Bar looking into cases of attorney misconduct. Georgia’s career in education started as a substitute teacher. From the start, something clicked for her in the classroom and she found her passion working with special needs students. Her entire LAUSD career has been at one school — Saturn Elementary — with students on the Autism spectrum in preschool and primary classes. Georgia was raised in a household where the struggle for social justice, racial justice, and equity was front and center. With her perspective coming from Belize, Georgia looks at the American system and knows that collective action is the only way to balance the scales in an unequal society. On day one, when Georgia signed her teaching contract, she also signed her UTLA membership card.