Retired Teacher Marches for California’s Schools and State’s Future |
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Gavin Riley taught in California’s public schools for 37 years. Today, the retired California Federation of Teachers member is in the 40th day of a 48-day, 250-mile March for California’s Future. Riley wants nothing less than to save the school system that educated him in the 1950s and 1960s, and where he in turn taught thousands more.
Sponsored by the California Federation of Teachers (CFT), AFSCME and a coalitionof labor, education and faith groups, the march is drawing attention to the state’s budget crisis and the devastating impact of budget cuts on Californians now and into the future.
At the California Progress Report, Riley writes that during the weeks he and the other marchers have been on the road from Bakersfield, through the San Joaquin Valley and then onto Sacramento,
[o]ur walk has allowed us to see ample evidence of the crisis: crumbling road and irrigation systems, high unemployment, foreclosed houses everywhere, overcrowded classrooms courtesy of teacher layoffs, people living under highway overpasses with few social services available, fallow farm fields and closed processing plants, to name just a few. About the only thing growing seems to be the number of new prisons in the Valley, an ironic epitome of the problem.
He recalls famous marches for justice in the 1960s, especially the 1966 march from Delano to Sacramento by César Chávez and the Farm Workers. Their march raised Californians’