SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Students in the Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) have been out of school for seven days. The effects are being felt especially hard by community organizations that have traditionally stepped in to fill gaps for underserved communities.
Bailey Faught, a seventh grader, would normally be in class on a Thursday at Will C. Wood Middle School.
“I’d probably be in my fifth period, orchestra, and I’d be playing my viola,” Faught said.
Ever since March 22 when the strike began, she has been her spending days at Bridge Network, a nonprofit safe space for at-risk youth in South Sacramento.
Faught said she doesn’t mind the break, but her parents do.
“They want us back in school. They have a lot of kids at home, and so it’s hard balancing with the three other kids that would normally be at school,” Faught said.
Still, she said she understands the strike.
“I’ve had to go into the cafeteria multiple times for classes, and the vice principal would stand in for a teacher for me because we don’t have enough substitutes. So, I can see why they’d be out striking,” Faught said.
Peggy Delgado Fava is the executive director of Bridge Network. She didn’t think the strike would going on for as long as it has.
“I would think a couple days, you know - three days max,” Delgado Fava said.
She said Bridge Network would normally be open for a few hours after school. Currently, they’re open all day, and they have already seen problems.
“Our very first week, when they were on strike, we had - already - incidents here with the kids, because they’re idle,” Delgado Fava said.
While she said that some kids like getting a break, there are still issues to contend with.
“You’ve got this freedom in the beginning, but now there’s a security issue because there’s a lot of unsupervised kids. Parents have to go to work, and they still have to maintain their lives,” Delgado Fava said.
She wants both teachers and the school district to keep at least one thing in mind.
“We need to put our kids first, number one, and everything else can then fall down. We can disagree how we implement that, but really, they are struggling so much,” Delgado Fava said.
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