7 Questions

Today's guest is my friend Nick Melvoin. Nick has spent his career fighting for our city’s schoolchildren. He believes that together, with the right leadership, we can ensure that every student in Los Angeles has the opportunity to succeed. Born and raised on the Westside of LA, Nick served as a seventh and eighth grade English teacher at Markham Middle School, an LAUSD campus in Watts, where he coached soccer and baseball and helped his students launch a school newspaper. At Markham, he saw firsthand how LAUSD failed to support schools and neglected the needs of our city’s most vulnerable students. When he and two-thirds of Markham’s teachers lost their jobs due to budget cuts, he fought to be re-hired and worked to end the indiscriminate, seniority-based teacher layoffs that harm so many LA families. As a teacher, Nick joined the ACLU, Mayors Riordan and Villaraigosa, and others to bring a ground-breaking civil rights lawsuit which argued that LA’s layoffs violated the rights of students. They won. Nick hol