Your donation helps us produce journalism like this. Please give today.

Graciela Ortiz was born and raised in District 5 of LA Unified. She is running for a position on the LAUSD School Board. The UCLA and Cal State Long Beach graduate is a licensed clinical social worker who represents neighborhoods in Northeast LA and much of Southeast LA, from Eagle Rock to South Gate.

Ortiz has worked in both education and government. She worked at LAUSD for 18 years as a student services and attendance counselor and now serves as an administrator, overseeing 152 counselors in 254 schools. Ortiz has been a city council member for nine years, including serving as mayor of Huntington Park for two of those years.

Ortiz is endorsed by the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, the Los Angeles School Police Officers Association and SEIU 99, which represents 50,000 public and private education workers.

“I have the experience of hitting the ground running from day one,” Ortiz said in an interview with LA School Report. Ortiz shared her plans to advocate for fully funded schools, her experiences as a consultant and her thoughts on safety in schools.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You've shared that your top three priorities are fully funded schools, reduced class sizes and safety. Can you tell me more about the changes you would like to see in these areas?

I want to ensure that all open positions in all of our schools are filled. Unfortunately, many schools have the positions and the money for them, but for a variety of reasons the positions are not being filled… The reality is that we all need services. We need to make sure we have psychiatric social workers, nurses, campus aides, and bus drivers. We should not outsource these services when we have great employees in our district who are truly committed to the students they work with.

So when I talk about fully funded schools, I mean that all positions are filled, but also that we provide students with all the services we need, and that includes mental health services and security guards to ensure their safety.

When I talk about smaller class sizes, we need to make sure that we are reducing class sizes at all grade levels, not just elementary school.

What do you think about the role of police in schools?

My thought process is to make sure we have our own police department that actually patrols our schools. My problem with outside agencies coming into our schools is that they do not have the training to work with our students and our families.

With LA School Police, we are able to train them in restorative justice practices and be able to assess how to redirect a particular case if there is a behavioral issue. So put (students) in a diversion program where school police redirect to counselors.

This is why I truly believe that we need to have our own school police force so that we can continue to provide services that distract from the criminalization of our students.

What motivated you to become a Student Services and Attendance Advisor for LAUSD?

I actually interned at LAUSD (Student Services and Attendance) while I was working on my Masters in Social Work at Cal State Long Beach. I wanted to help at-risk students, which is what I do now, but I was thinking about going to the Department of Children and Family Services or the Department of Juvenile Probation to get kids out of the criminal justice system.

But as a student services and attendance intern, I realized that it is a great preventative type of work that we do as attendance counselors. We remove all possible barriers that prevent a child from going to school. So what does that look like? Crisis intervention, home visits to really assess what the family needs, providing basic resources, providing affordable housing options, identifying resources in the community where we work to make sure the student comes to school every single day.

LAUSD has faced declining enrollment since the COVID-19 pandemic. What do you think is the best way to deal with this?

There is a bigger problem in our society right now and that is the cost of living. We have a lot of families moving from Los Angeles to other states, to other parts of the state of California, where they can afford an apartment or buy a house.

In particular, I think we need to do a better job of ensuring that our families and our communities know the great services we offer in our schools. We must act immediately to fill the positions and services these schools need. So for me one of the biggest issues or biggest goals is to have fully funded schools.

This year, LAUSD has banned charter schools from nearly half of its school buildings. Do you support the new co-location restrictions for charter schools? What do you think about that?

I really don’t think we need to politicize charter schools and LAUSD schools. Ultimately, parents want good schools in their communities. I believe the district and board need to re-evaluate the state's proposal that requires school districts to provide this space to charter schools when there is open space and what that specifically looks like.

I would like to become a board member to be able to ask these questions and ensure that we do not hold the district liable because voters voted on the proposal. Ultimately, I feel that co-location makes it difficult for each individual school if they don't work hand in hand and collaborate.

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.