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By Stephen M. Lepore For Dailymail.Com 06:03 23 Mar 2023, updated 12:16 23 Mar 2023

The radical president of Los Angeles' teachers union, who once said 'there is no such thing as learning loss' and attended an NBA game in a suite after announcing a solidarity strike, is among those in support of the LA schools' strikes.

Staff atLos Angeles's only public school districtbraved the rain to make good on their threats of a three-day strike Tuesday in hopes of obtaining better wages,shutting down the nation's second-largest school system in the process.

Educators and employees have been slammed on social media for failing families, saying they are using nearly 500,000 young people as 'leverage' in their own battle for better pay and other benefits.

SEIU99 Executive Director Max Arias has led the support staff union into the strike and insisted the strike was the 'workers' last resort', arrived at only after nearly a year of bargaining for better wages.

His union has been supported in a 'solidarity strike' by United Teachers Los Angeles and their union President Cecily Myart-Cruz, someone who has courted controversy in the past for her views on lockdowns and social justice.

Ahead of her election as president, Myart-Cruz spoke at the convention for the left-wing political group Democratic Socialists of America's 2019 convention in Atlanta, in which she stated 'I see teaching as a revolutionary act, just the way I see organizing.'

'It's hard, it's messy and sometimes it can be too much but you can never allow fear to win. We must engage folks to take action in different ways and we must work to make every work site an anti-racist one.'

She's seen elsewhere in the speech criticizing the 'neoliberal' Los Angeles Unified School District which she argues 'starved our schools' and claimed bosses in all walks of life 'prey on fear.'

Her union bio also shows her as a member of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, the 2020 rallies of which she used to suggest there is 'no such thing as learning loss' for children who were not in school during the COVID-19 pandemic.

'Our kids didn't lose anything,' she told LA Magazinein 2021. 'It's OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.'

Her other remarks included 'reopening schools without a broader improvement of schools will be unsafe and will deepen racial and class inequalities' and 'You can recall the Governor, you can recall the school board. But how are you going to recall me?'

Myart-Cruz won re-election in 2023 on a platform that included requests for schools to take pieces of a 'Green New Deal' into their district.

Their demands included expansion of outdoor education space, tech education in green energy fields, solar panels on all district buildings, increased electric school buses and extending free public transportation for students.

She also led the union while it planned to voteon joining the 'Boycott, Divest and Sanction' movement against Israel. The vote was eventually shut down after heavy criticism.

Before becoming head of the teacher's union, Myart-Cruz attended Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, then Mount Saint Mary's, a Catholic women's college inBrentwood.She graduated in 1995, and on to Pepperdine to gain her teaching certificate - where fees now stand at $80,000-a-year.

She began her teaching career in Compton, then went to an elementary school Westwood where kids first thought she was too strict but ended up 'loving her', according to a teacher who taught next door.

She is divorced from her husband of 16 years and the pair share a ten-year-old son.

She is now datingVanCedric Williams, an elected member of the Oakland Unified School Board, according to the Los Angeles Magazine article.

The pair attended an NBA game between the Los Angeles Clippers and Golden State Warriors with Assemblyman Matt Haney in a box suite just after declaring the solidarity strike.

She then went to teach at Mesa Elementary in Crenwshaw, where students and their families were less affluent - but didn't last there long, according to former colleagues.

In 2020, the former head of the union - Alex Caputo Pearl - reached his term limit and endorsed her to take over.

She stopped teaching 2014 to devote herself to the union full time and was part of the leadership team when dues were increased from $689-a-year to $917 in 2016.

She took over in February 2020 - a month before the pandemic closed schools all over America and the world.

There are 33,000 teachers in the union but only 5,000 voted in the election where she became president with 69 percent of the vote - about 3,500 votes.

Earlier this year, she blamed 'white wealthy parents' for wanting to get kids back into classrooms, claiming: 'Unfortunately, the plan reverts to deeply flawed ideas in Gavin Newsom's proposal in December to offer school districts more money if they open faster.

'If you condition funding on the reopening of schools, that money will only go to white and wealthier schools that do not have the transmission rates that low income black and brown communities do.'

The Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has also heavily backed and worked with the unions. Myart-Cruz spoke at its convention in 2019.

The left-wing group has already held a 'Tacos for Teachers' event on Tuesday, and several days of phone banking efforts to campaign for the unions.

Their social media feeds have been full of DSA-LA members marching the picket lines with the union members.

Meanwhile, SEIU99 Executive Director Max Arias, promoted a march to Defund the Police and re-invest in schools in 2020.

At a rally on Monday, Arias led picketers in a chant of 'no justice, no peace' and said their campaign was about justice.

'It's about 65,000 education workers telling the district what it needs to do to improve the conditions of schools to ensure that every student can succeed and do what they wish in life. Listen to the voices of the people that do the work.'

He finished by saying the only thing that could stop their work was 'justice' before leading the chant.

The native of El Salvador notably has a plaque in his office stating 'it's on, motherf**kers!' according to the LA Times.

He proudly boasted of his membership: 'Once you learn you have power, its not easy to take it away. Theyve shut the district down!'

Now, more than 1,000 public schools are closed, and processions consisting ofsome30,000 non-teaching support workers and 35,000 teachers are sprouting up across the city.

The campaign for increased pay in the wake of rampant inflationand soaring housing costs saw thousands traversing the dark, rainy morning as early as 5:00 am Tuesday to march rain ponchos and jackets.

Union members behind the strike argue that the school support staffers - such as janitors, bus drivers, and lunch workers - on average, earn just $25,000 per year, forced to live in poverty in high-priced LA. The average annual rate of pay for a cashier at Burger King, for reference, is roughly $27,000, according to Glassdoor.

Taking to the streets Monday, workers affixed signs to their umbrellas while others offered pro-union chants in the storm of protests, which had been anticipated for weeks - and come as a somewhat unfavorable outcome for the district, as well as roughly a million parents, with more than 500,000 students now set to miss school.

Members of Service Employees International Union Local 99 were among those marching in the cold rain Tuesday, toting signs with messages that decried the district for not adhering to their demands - which include a 30 percent pay raise.

'We've had enough of empty promises,' Arias told the outlet, flanked by school staffers and supporters of their demands. 'If LAUSD truly values and is serious about reaching an agreement, they must show workers the respect they deserve.'

While citizens are fed up, public school workers in the embattled state - which is currently mulling over a proposal that would see roughly 1.8million black Californians gifted $360,000 in 'reparations' - are equally tired with the local government, leading to the planned walkouts that were announced last week.

'Workers are fed-up with living on poverty wages and having their jobs threatened for demanding equitable pay,'Arais said in a statement last week criticizing district for not bowing to their demands of an immediate wage increase.

'Workers are fed-up with the short staffing at LAUSD - and being harassed for speaking up.'

On Wednesday, Superintendent Carvahlo decried the possibility of a strike after prolonged campus closures interrupted students' learning during the pandemic.

'What are the consequences?' Carvalho said of the possible repercussions of yet another week of closures.'The consequences are once again learning loss, deprivation of safety and security that schools provide to our kids, deprivation of food and nutrition that many of our kids depend on.'

He added: 'I know that we focus our attention on the needs of the workforce. I need to focus my attention also primarily on the needs of our kids.'

Parents have expressed similar concerns. Local mother Yesenia Benites complained the closures will not only affect her young daughter, but her as well, as she divides her time between parenting and taking online classes at an undergrad university.

'Since I do go to college and take online classes, having to have a daughter that's here... it's gonna take my study time to do homework and all that.'

That said, the mom said she was most concerned about her daughter.

'She's going to miss being with her friends and learning,' she lamented.

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The Los Angeles union chiefs holding education of 500,000 Californian schoolkids to ransom - Daily Mail