Today a map came out in the LA Times of the 250 schools in LA Unified that are being opened up to charter takeover. One of the schools is Figueroa Street Elementary School where, in 1996, Alfredo Perez, a 30-year-old fifth-grade teacher, was hit in the head by a stray gang bullet. Here’s how the LA Daily News reported it:
A stray bullet fired in a gang dispute crashed through a school library window early Thursday and critically injured a teacher as his fifth-grade students watched in horror.
The 23 terrified and crying children in the Figueroa Street Elementary School library dove for cover or made their way outside as their teacher, Alfredo Perez, 30, fell to the floor.
“Everybody was screaming and running, and there was blood,” said a somber 10-year-old Maria Ochoa as her baby sitter picked her up from the South Los Angeles school. “I was crying, and thinking he was dead.”
And the LA Times:
Speaking to reporters later in the day, Maria Ochoa, 10, one of Perez’s 23 students, said her teacher was sitting in a chair when she “heard a very loud noise like someone was hitting something very hard.
“I was very scared and I couldn’t move from my desk,” recounted Ochoa, who had been reading a book about rocks. “Everybody was running around and shouting.”
She looked up to see Perez still in the chair, a bullet hole in his forehead and blood trickling from the wound.
He was much loved, worked in one of the worst neighborhoods in LA, and two years later, after making a partial recovery, he returned to the scene of “the accident,” as he called it, to participate in a safety event. Again from the LA Times:
Deeply religious, Perez, who can walk slowly without a cane, credits his faith for his recovery.
“If I speak to someone that does not know about God, I just tell them to hang in there because it can be a cruel world,” he said as he sat on a love seat next to his wife, Virginia. “Sometimes you’re dealt a good hand. Sometimes you’re dealt a bad hand. I was dealt a bad hand that day. But thanks to God and my wife and the support, I’ve come a long way.”
I’m not sure where he is now; I don’t think he ever made it back to teaching. But if he were still teaching at Figueroa there would be a good possibility that he would be losing his job very soon. Figueroa is a failing school, according to the Board of Ed, and therefore a candidate for charter takeover. Since many charter corporations insist on firing entire faculties before taking over a school, it is quiet likely that all of the teachers at Figueroa will lose their jobs. How many other Alfredo Perezes are among them, dedicated educators who put their lives on the line to teach in LA’s worst schools? And not just at Figueroa but at all of the schools on the takeover list?
But I almost forgot. The problem with schools isn’t poverty, gangs or violence. The problem is crappy teachers.
I wonder what Alfredo Perez would think about that.
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first and foremost, I am one of those students who were at the incident when my teacher, Mr. Perez was shot right in front of me. We we’re in the library, I didn’t want to attend or let any other class member go to the library, I insisted but there was no use.
Responding to your “comment,” I think that the problem isn’t the teachers, or the students it is the institutions of a failed educational democracy!
If you knew what it is like to grow up in LA, and attend Figueroa Elementary you would know it isn’t the buildings, the teachers, or their teaching methods, it is the institution and the lack of resources that democracy in educational classes have faltered the system.
Mr. Perez is AND ALWAYS WILL BE a teacher among the most loved and respected, for his encouragement of educating the students and disregarding the institutions and lack of resources which NEVER impeded us to learn beyond our level of fifth grade education.
As we were in fifth grade, we learned above our standard, because of a teacher like him, who didn’t care for the lack of resources or the institutions ignorance, he rose to the occasion to educate from heart but most importantly with intellect.
If he were able to know your “standards” I think he would conter act your disposition and give you a few, or more than a few points on teaching and educators, it isn’t their abilities to teach its the democratic institutions themselves, in areas like Los Angeles that have the lack of resources to provide the necessary tools for tomorrows doctors, teachers, and lawyers.
As a former Medical student I resent your comment, but most of all I pity your lack of research and knowledge base criteria that falls short of your views.
“to keep an open mind to the concept, it to enter into an endless view of learning”- Mr. Perez fifth grade class, mathematics lecture!