LAUSD: ‘Violating Employee Rights and Misleading the Courts’

With so many news articles revealing that the American Federation of Teachers was far more deeply involved with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s school reopening guidance from February 2021 than previously known, we now also know that the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) was driving the bus nearly identically in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest school district in the country.

Emails and documents seen by the New York Post show CDC Director Rochelle Walensky took a call from AFT President Randi Weingarten on Feb. 7, 2021, five days before the CDC released its “Operational Strategy for K-12 Schools Through Phased Mitigation.”

“AFT and its fellow union, the National Education Association, also asked the White House and CDC for help shaping its press strategy to show the rank-and-file they and the Biden administration were on the same page, emails reveal,” the Post reported.

Just announced Wednesday, the AFT union and President Randi Weingarten testified before the House COVID Select Committee to focus on “the role Ms. Weingarten and the AFT played in…keeping schools closed longer than necessary,” said Chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup. “Weingarten will be the only witness at the hearing for the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic,” the Washington Times reported.

.@AFTunion President @rweingarten will testify before @COVIDSelect.

The hearing is set to focus on "the role Ms. Weingarten and the AFT played in…keeping schools closed longer than necessary," said Chairman @RepBradWenstrup.https://t.co/bx4C0tj4L8

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) April 26, 2023

It didn’t go well. Weingarten didn’t apologize for shutting schools down or for shaking down American taxpayers to pay for the school closures and eventual re-openings, and instead claimed that the Biden administration that reached out to her about closing the schools. (More on this tomorrow).

In California, the Los Angeles Unified School District is facing a lawsuit over its COVID vaccine mandate as some district employees still remain on unpaid leave status.

The Globe spoke with Leslie Manookian, Founder of the Health Freedom Defence Fund (more than 20 years ago), who filed suit against the LAUSD in 2021 following LAUSD terminating 1,000 teachers and staff, for declining to take the COVID vaccines.

LAUSD first tried to mandate the COVID vaccine when the shot was introduced, Manookian said. “We sued in 2021, and they rescinded the mandate the next day.” However, that was not the end of it.

“In July 2021, as the case was working its way through the system, LAUSD represented to our attorney and in a brief filed with the court, that there ‘is no mandate’ and that LAUSD had no intention of issuing a mandate. The court accepted this representation in dismissing the case as not ‘ripe’ on July 27, 2021. Thus, if there is no mandate, the lawsuit is not ripe.”

“Seventeen days later LAUSD issued a COVID vaccine mandate,” Manookian said.

So they filed suit again. Manookian said the lawsuit filed by HFDF, on behalf of California Educators for Medical Freedom (CAEMF), and individual plaintiffs challenged the Los Angeles Unified School District’s COVID-19 injection mandate for all teachers and staff as a condition of employment because it violates the employees’ liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which includes rights of personal autonomy, self-determination, bodily integrity, and the right to reject medical treatment.

“We discovered that LAUSD had not been forthright with the District Court during the first case when it claimed there ‘is no mandate.’”

“According to depositions taken during the course of the second case, LAUSD Chief Human Resource Officer Ileana Davalos stated that ‘they were drafting a mandate in the first half of July 2021,’ demonstrating that LAUSD had not been telling the truth about the mandates with the court in the first case.”

Manookian said the mandate was a violation of privacy under the due process clause of the Constitution, and it was also “arbitrary” because the CDC had already admitted that the shots do not stop transmission of COVID-19. “So it’s a medicine or a theraputic, and not a vaccine,” she said.

Teachers lost their jobs for refusing the experimental vaccine, and some were relegated to online teaching and left in limbo, Manookian said. Teachers were told their religious beliefs didn’t matter, or their medical needs didn’t matter. “Some have had adverse reactions to other shots. They’ve been denied the the ability to protect themselves and their religious beliefs. They’ve been fired for doing so, or were just cast aside.”

Manookian said there is decades of law to support the lawsuit and enforce it. And because the CDC admitted that the shots are not a vaccine but a therapeutic, everyone has a right to refuse. Yet many LAUSD teachers and staff succumbed and got the shot just to stay employed.

Notably Manookian said LAUSD’s attorneys are trying to ask for attorneys fees based on the ridiculous claim that employees not wanting to submit to an experimental modified gene therapy vaccine was frivolous.

The Globe will next publish interviews with teachers who were able and/or willing to go on the record about how they were treated by the UTLA, as well as LAUSD when they refused the COVID shot on religious or medical grounds.