About 10 people came to Austin Beutner’s home to protest.
UTLA Take Strike to Beutner’s House
About 10 people, teachers, parents and organizers, protested at LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner’s home in the Palisades Riviera around noon on Sunday, January 20.
The teacher’s strike is in its fifth day: talks are continuing over the three-day weekend, that celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
Beutner, the son of German immigrants who came to American for economic opportunity, continues to be villainized by strikers who chant “Billionaires can’t teach our kids.” His mom taught in public schools.
After graduating from Dartmouth in 1982, Beutner worked at Smith Barney as a financial analyst. When he was 29, he became a partner at The Blackstone Group and in the 1990s he co-founded Evercore Partners, which went public in 2006.
He worked for the U.S. State Department after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the Clinton administration chose him to lead a team to Russia, to help them transition from communism to a free-market economy.
Vision to Learn, a nonprofit founded by Beutner in 2012, provides free eye exams and glasses to children in low-income communities. Initially serving students in L.A.U.S.D., Vision to Learn now serves students in 118 school districts in 261 cities and 13 states across the country, helping more than 140,000 students since it was founded.
The strikers were in Beutner’s driveway, which is private property. Officers from LAPD, who were monitoring, were asked why the strikers weren’t kept on the streets. The officer in charge said that Beutner didn’t mind that strikers were on his driveway.
Thank you for showing the other side Sue! I appreciate what Austin Beutner is trying to do, to work within a budget and save the LAUSD endowment for long-range capital needs, like building more classrooms. Isn’t illegal immigration the root cause of overcrowded classes? We can’t have it both ways: let everyone in to our country and then complain that it’s overcrowded!
Is illegal immigration the root cause of our overcrowded classrooms?