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

Ortiz has worked in both education and government. She’s worked within LAUSD for 18 years as a Pupil Services and Attendance Counselor and now as an administrator, overseeing 152 counselors throughout 254 schools. Ortiz has been a city council member for nine years, 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 to hit the ground running on day one,” Ortiz said in an interview with LA School Report. Ortiz shared her plans to push for fully funded schools, her experience as a counselor and thoughts on safety in schools. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

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

I want to make sure that all our schools have all their openings filled. Unfortunately, for many schools, they have the positions, and they have the money for the positions, but they’re not filled positions for various reasons…The reality is we need all services. We need to make sure that we have psychiatric social workers, nurses, our campus aides, our bus drivers. We shouldn’t be outsourcing these services when we have amazing employees within our district that really are passionate about the students that they work with. 

So when I talk about having fully funded schools, I mean that all positions are filled, but also making sure we’re providing all services to students that we need, and that includes mental health services and safety personnel to ensure their safety.

When I talk about lower class sizes, we need to make sure that we’re lowering class sizes in all grade levels, not just elementary school. 

What are your thoughts on the role of police in schools? 

My thoughts on that is making sure that we have our own police department that actually patrols our schools. My issue with outside agencies coming into our schools is that they don’t have the training to work with our students and our families. 

With LA school police, we are able to train them on restorative justice practices, on being able to assess how to divert a particular case when there’s a behavior issue. So putting [students] into a diversion program where school police diverts to counselors. 

That’s why I really believe that we have to have our own school police department so that we can continue to provide services that are going to divert from criminalizing our students.

What made you want to become a pupil services and attendance counselor for LAUSD?

I actually interned with LAUSD [pupil services and attendance] as I was working on my Master’s 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 into the Department of Children and Family Services or Department of Juvenile Probation to get kids out of the criminal justice system. 

But as a pupil services and attendance intern, I realized that it was a great preventative type of work that we do as attendance counselors. We break down every possible barrier that impedes a child from being in school. So what does that look like? Crisis intervention, home visits to the homes to really assess what the family needs, providing basic resources, providing affordable housing opportunities, figuring out where resources are within the community that we’re working in to make sure that the student is coming 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’s a bigger issue within our society right now, and that’s the cost of living. We have many families that are moving out of Los Angeles to go into other states, go to other parts of the state of California where they’re able to afford an apartment or able to afford to purchase a home.

In particular, I think we need to do a better job of making sure that our families and our communities know the great services that we are offering in our schools. We need to act immediately to be able to fill those positions and fill those services that those schools need. Hence why one of the biggest issues, or biggest goals, for me, is having fully funded schools. 

This year, LAUSD banned charter schools from nearly half of its school buildings. Do you support the new limits on charter school co-locations? What are your thoughts on it?

I really don’t believe we need to politicize charter schools and LAUSD schools. At the end of the day, what parents want is good schools in their communities. I do believe that the district and the board need to reassess the proposition from the state that requires school districts to provide that space to charter schools when there is open space, and what that looks like specifically. 

I would love to become a board member to be able to ask those questions and make sure that we’re not opening up the district to liability, because the voters voted on the proposition. Ultimately, I believe co-location makes it difficult for every single school if they’re not working hand in hand and working together.

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