Tanya Ortiz Franklin is the teacher we need on the LAUSD Board

By Mayra Rebecca Zamora

The residents of our school board district have an important choice to make this year as we look for a successor to Board Member Richard Vladovic. This election season, we have a choice between a career bureaucrat or an LAUSD success story who has built her career serving our students.

Tanya Ortiz Franklin is the choice that I will be making – not only is she not a politician or a bureaucrat, but she is the only candidate with true classroom experience. Tanya was raised in our community, attending LAUSD schools, and she taught in our community schools, too.

As an LAUSD mom of two kids with special needs, it is important to me that we have board members that know our communities and can identify with the challenges our students face.

Tanya is a first-generation Angeleno and was raised by a single mother who had emigrated from Mexico. She attended LAUSD’s Fleming Middle School, the same school that made such a huge positive impact on my two sons, and then graduated from LAUSD’s Narbonne High.

In her professional life, Tanya has dedicated herself to serving students, fighting for equity for underserved kids. She has worked directly in the classroom for five years at Stephen White Middle school teaching English and History. After being laid off in 2010 due to the drastic budget cuts made during the Great Recession, she continued to work for our students. She went to law school and became a special education attorney.

Her experience working with families of kids with special needs like mine is especially important because so many of our kids with disabilities are struggling right now with distance learning and have been left behind during this pandemic.

Tanya gets it and is determined to help, which starts by listening to parents like me. Tanya has a plan to authentically engage parents, and she has shown that she’s willing and able to bring parents and teachers together to focus on helping our kids.

Today, Tanya works for the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, which was created to provide extra support to district schools where kids were falling behind. The Partnership has grown to support 19 historically underserved schools – including five high schools, four middle schools, and 10 elementary schools, with more than 14,000 students. Tanya trains educators on restorative justice practices and social-emotional learning.

The work that Tanya has done for our community has made a tremendous difference in students’ lives by promoting educational and racial equity in schools.

Her dedication to our students is recognized in the unanimous endorsements by the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Daily News, and the Daily Breeze. She has also earned the support of two former LA Mayors and LAUSD parents like me.

We already have too many board members that are career bureaucrats and are part of LA’s political machine. We need someone who can bring a fresh perspective. We need someone who has been working with our students through these unprecedented times and has dedicated herself to helping all students.

As the Daily Breeze said in their endorsement, she “is an LAUSD success story.” If you ask me, that’s exactly who I would want to represent the interests of my family on the school board.

--- Mayra Zamora is a parent of two students with special needs that attend LAUSD schools in District 7. Mayra has been helping parents advocate for their students in special education for over 10 years and is currently an officer on two LAUSD parent committees, a member of her School Site Council and Local School Leadership Council.