Readers React: After Deasy, next LAUSD leader must support teachers

To the editor: Lost in all this controversy over departing Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. John Deasy is an important fact: The most crucial employees in a school district are its teachers. All administrators, including superintendents, should exist to assist the teachers by making sure they have the supplies, the environment and the support staff necessary to facilitate the imparting of knowledge and the well-being of the students. (“John Deasy resigns; Ramon Cortines named interim head of L.A. schools,” Oct. 16)

It’s time to reevaluate the practice of paying administrators handsomely when teachers are left without proper textbooks and students go without needed classes. We should lower administrator salaries and put the money toward smaller class sizes, repairing infrastructure and hiring more classroom aides.

Instead, we have a system in which teachers act as social workers and often pay for their own supplies. Teachers should be among the highest paid district employees because they do the work that makes a school a school.

Angela Black, Long Beach

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To the editor: Where else in California can you find a student sweating in a classroom without air conditioning and who has no textbook to use and no classes assigned for the rest of the day, but is holding an iPad without proper curriculum software?

Good riddance to Deasy. Now, what do we do with the equally culpable people who hired him and approved his programs?

Mike Post, Winnetka

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To the editor: I worked for the LAUSD in the 1960s and ‘70s and have followed the district’s drama ever since. What we have just witnessed is the latest episode in its version of Goldilocks.

Some superintendents “weren’t urgent enough,” and some were “too urgent.” Maybe someday, the district’s Board of Education will find a superintendent who is “just right.”

Wendell H. Jones, Ojai

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