NEA PRESIDENT Becky Pringle was a special guest at the National Community Schools Learning Lab’s multi-day session in Anaheim in April.

Pringle with teacher and ASTA member Veronica Lopez at Loara High School.

Pringle was there to participate in the Learning Lab’s community schools visits and hear about best practices in implementing community schools’ shared decision-making model involving educators, district administrators, community members, students and families.

The Learning Lab, funded by NEA’s Great Public Schools initiative and coordinated by Anaheim Secondary Teachers Assn. and the Anaheim Union High School District, brings together teams of local stakeholders from across California and beyond. It recently took its program to several cities on the East Coast.

Pringle and others at Magnolia High School’s Agriscience Community Center (MACC) where MACC Farm Coordinator and ASTA Member Sabina Giakoumis explains that the walls are used to nurture and grow plants.

Pringle spoke to the attendees about community schools’ significance in giving our children the education they deserve — and that in this current political climate, especially, how we must step up to protect the right to learn.

“Of all the civil rights for which this world has fought and died for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental,” she said, quoting American sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois. “The freedom to learn has been bought by bitter sacrifice. So whatever you might think of the curtailment of other civil rights, you must fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn.”

For more about your union’s work with community schools, visit cta.org/communityschools.