The Morning Routine That Just Vanished: Lunches Unpacked, Coffee Gone Cold and Kids With Nowhere to Go  

Imagine waking up before dawn, packing lunches, brewing coffee, dropping your kids at school and then heading into your work day. 

Now you can focus on building your career and generating the income your family depends on, all because your kids are safe and learning.

Your entire routine hinges on a simple assumption: Every weekday, your children will be exactly where they belong.

Now imagine that assumption is deliberately ripped away.

California teacher unions, with access to significant taxpayer-funded dues, implemented a coordinated strategy to maximize their bargaining power. They instructed teachers across multiple districts to walk out of classrooms simultaneously as part of a deliberate effort known as “We Can’t Wait.”

This wasn’t spontaneous; it was the culmination of a strategy to coordinate actions for maximum leverage, leading to synchronized strikes across the state.

According to the California Teachers Association, local educator unions intentionally synchronized the expiration dates of contracts in dozens of districts. The aim was to allow multiple districts to negotiate on the same core issues at the same time. 

With contracts ending concurrently, unions could issue broad, statewide demands. And if those demands weren’t met, they could organize strikes that shut down schools across an entire region at once.

The CTA president openly admitted the disruption was planned, noting it was “not a coincidence at all.” The strategy was intended to exacerbate the chaos, overwhelm working parents with nowhere to send their kids, burden taxpayers already paying the bills and leave the community scrambling while classrooms remain empty.

Look at what just happened with the United Educators of San Francisco.

For four straight days, schools across the district were shuttered. Approximately 50,000 students lost instruction. With the average California school day at about 6.5 hours, that’s roughly 26 hours of lost learning per child, at a time when many districts are still struggling to recover from pandemic-era declines.

If we were to multiply these numbers by the number of students across both the San Francisco and West Contra Costa strikes, that would be approximately 72,000 kids and their 288,000 instructional days erased, with a staggering 1.9 million hours of learning lost.

Their parents had to scramble for emergency babysitters, burn through vacation days, or just pray the Wi-Fi held up for another “learning from home” disaster.

San Francisco’s Superintendent Maria Su went on record saying, “Every day that schools are closed, the district’s financial situation worsens; SFUSD will lose as much as $7 million to $10 million daily.” 

After four days, the bill landed somewhere between $28 million and $40 million in wasted taxpayer money (some outlets even pegged the chaos at $50 million once the fines and attendance-based funding hits were tallied).

The district’s response was raiding $11 million (or $111 million depending on which reserve column you read) from the rainy-day fund, projecting a $30 million deficit next year and starting to hand out pink slip — 42 to teacher aides, 328 potential temporary teacher releases, central office cuts … the works. 

All so the kids could stare at the “School Closed” sign while the adults played power games.

And for what? Empty classrooms and the clear message that your children’s education is a negotiable commodity.

Here’s the irony: These same unions spent years and millions of your dues money electing the very school boards they later picketed.

In San Francisco alone, the United Educators of San Francisco Candidate PAC and COPE committee dropped cash on everything from:

•  $6,637 to a local parcel tax ballot measure; 
• $5,400 to candidate Timothy Durning; 
• $5,375 to the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club Political Action Fund; 
• $5,000 in independent expenditures to the San Francisco Labor Council; and, 
• a cozy $1,800 here, $750 there for good measure. 

The strikes themselves are also meant to serve as a spectacle.

Union leadership needs dramatic action to justify collecting high membership dues at a time when more teachers are questioning their value. The numbers prove it so.

CTA’s own January survey shows that 40 percent of teachers are already looking to leave the profession. Education Week just reported that nearly 50 percent of teachers in California plan to quit or retire in the next decade. Even with the highest salaries in America and the fresh raises from these strikes, teachers are still eyeing the exits.

If these massive union strikes were actually helping teachers, California educators would be millionaires by now, after all the chaos they have caused.

The fact that so many are still struggling, even with the highest salaries in the nation, shows that walkouts are not the answer. Yet the unions keep swearing by the same failed tactics.

And the next round under the “We Can’t Wait” banner is already here. Twin Rivers Unified teachers are on Day 4 of their strike right now, with Natomas Unified teachers starting their strike as well.

Together, both districts serve roughly 41,000 kids, which means thousands more California parents woke up this week with the exact same vanished morning routine that parents in San Francisco experienced — lunches unpacked, coffee gone cold and kids with nowhere to go.

The Dublin Unified teachers’ union is currently on its festival of mass disruption.

Ironically, Twin Rivers union president Brittoni Ward justified the walkout by pointing to the very crisis it makes worse: “Every single day, more than 2,000 of our students are left without a permanent credentialed teacher in their classroom.” 

So, her brilliant solution to this issue is to pull thousands more teachers out of those classrooms and onto the picket line. Incredible.

Parents aren’t bargaining chips. Taxpayers are not the villains in this story. We’re the ones whose mornings vanished, whose kids lost 26 hours each in San Francisco alone, whose tax dollars funded both the strikes and the settlements and the political checks to the same people who caused the mess.

The next round under the “We Can’t Wait” banner is already being scripted. The only question left is whether California families are finally tired of being the punchline. The Colorado Education Association (CEA) has traveled to California to participate in the strikes in a show of support.

It’s clear that these unions view California as the guinea pig to test how much they can get away with. CEA wants to learn from this experience so that they can bring it back to their own state. They can have their own “We Can’t Wait” moment in Colorado and cause massive disruptions for the hard-working families of their state. This movement, should it succeed, will lead to a domino effect of unions across multiple states doing similar campaigns of massive disruption.

At this point, the real miracle is that there are still people who think this system makes sense.