What is it about California? Is there something in the air? Just when you think things couldn't get any more ridiculous, now we see that the Fresno Teachers Association (FTA) is threatening to strike over, among a laundry list of other items, something that the schools have nothing to do with--housing the homeless in school parking lots.

The Fresno Teachers Association (FTA) is demanding that the Fresno Unified School district set aside parking for homeless families, as a part of their larger list of demands – such as free laundry services – as the union prepares to go on strike.

The district has previously stated that it does not plan to bow to the union’s demand, with the district’s chief communications officer saying that, “We do not plan to open our parking lots,” since “education, not housing,” is the school district’s area of expertise.

In addition to the allotment of parking space, the FTA is also demanding that the district set aside $500,000 to provide security for the homeless parking spaces. As reported by the Fresno Bee, 496 students within the Fresno Unified School District were homeless as of the 2022-23 school year, which represents a 30 percent increase from the previous year. Alongside parking and security, the FTA also wants $20 million of funding to contribute toward solving student homelessness in the district.

Other amalgamated demands from the FTA include “$1 million for clothes and school supplies; $1.75 million for creating a food pantry with hygiene products,” along with, “$1 million for free laundry services; $1 million for free yoga; and meditation and low-impact exercise.”

They want free clothes and school supplies, a food pantry, and free laundry?  When did those things become the responsibility of the schools? I had to examine the story closely to make sure I wasn't reading a parody site. 

The proper reply from the Fresno Unified School District would be "get stuffed." Oh, but the Fresno teachers also want what amounts to more money for less work.

These rider demands are in addition to others related to salary and reducing class sizes. A vote to strike is scheduled to take place on October 18, if the union’s demands remain unmet.

This argument has been going on for a while now, and the demands from the teachers' union are not being met with much approval. That, at least, is some relief.

"We do not plan to open our parking lots as FTA is demanding," Fresno Unified School District chief communications officer Nikki Henry told Fox News, adding that the district has experts in "education, not housing."

These demands are ridiculous even for California, where in recent weeks we have seen a student whining over not being allowed to display the LGBTQ23+++ flag, the Los Angeles schools holding a "coming out week," and the state's Governor, the impeccably-coifed Gavin Newsom, signing a bill into law to allow 12-year-olds to get psychiatric counseling without parental consent or knowledge.

All the while, the state's academic test scores are in a bigger hole than the one blasted by the Chicxulub event. The Los Angeles Schools are in particular an utter failure; 61 percent of LA third-graders can't read or write at grade level, while 59 percent fail to meet even California's math proficiency standard.

At least they are able to choose their own pronouns.

To call California's schools a failure is akin to describing the Hundred Years' War as a "mild difference of opinion." A big part of the blame for that failure - if, indeed, not all the blame - can be laid at the feet of the various teachers' unions, and this dust-up in Fresno is just the latest proof. 

The Fresno Teachers Association clearly isn't interested in turning out graduates who have the proper skills and abilities to take up an independent, adult role in the economy; they are interested in more free goodies from the taxpayers, and virtue-signaling over transplanting Los Angeles and San Francisco-like homeless encampments, with the attendant waste and open-air drug markets, into school parking lots. 

But this is what you get with public-sector unions, who all too often negotiate their contracts with the very politicians whose campaigns they support. 

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is still paraded by the Democratic Party and others on the Left as a hero of liberal causes. Here is an excerpt of a 1937 letter he wrote to Luther C. Steward, President of the National Federation of Federal Employees:

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.

FDR, in this at least, was correct, and in today's public-sector unions, we see why. These teachers, in Fresno as in anywhere, are employed by the taxpayers, yet by and large the taxpayers have little say in the negotiation of contracts with those teachers. This is the result; self-entitled, spoiled government workers, paid by the taxpayers, who already enjoy benefits including medical, dental, and retirement packages far better than almost anyone in the private sector. Their interest is not in educating the kids; as evidence, I offer the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) who locked up our kids and closed schools during the COVID scare, who resisted opening the schools back up, and who place political activism over education. Once again, their members are paid by the taxpayers.

Public sector unions must be abolished. Teachers should be hired at the local level, as individuals, and treated as individual employees, rewarded or not, as befits their individual performance. I would prefer to see the schools privatized altogether, but moving the direct control of schools to the local school boards and eliminating collective bargaining for public-sector employees -- all of them -- would be an acceptable first step.