Inglewood teachers are openly blaming the district for not taking proper safety precautions on campuses after a report cited several issues, including violence, insecure access to schools and inadequate security.
Concerns were aired last week at an Inglewood Teachers Association meeting, where members discussed the 2025 Inglewood Unified School District Report Card, written by Amir Whitaker of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Whitaker noted that increasing safety issues at IUSD are related to school closures, which caused students from different, and sometimes territorial, neighborhoods to be placed together on the remaining campuses. The report points out that 48% of Inglewood’s schools have closed since 2018 — including the former Morningside High School, which is temporarily housing the city’s high school students due to construction at the original Inglewood High School.
“You don’t need a crystal ball to know what’s going to happen,” Whitaker said. “We documented in this report that community members demanded a safety plan, never got it, and now the prophecy is coming true.”
A series of events this month led to the current tipping point on safety. The ACLU published the IUSD report card on Nov. 1. Four days later, on Nov. 5, the teachers’ association held a rally during the city’s school board meeting to raise awareness about their safety concerns. The next day, Inglewood police said four students were involved in a physical altercation on the city’s lone high school campus that left one student with injuries from a stabbing.
“Security responds afterwards, but during these incidents, there were no preventative measures, which concerns the staff and the community,” ITA President John Hughes said after Thursday’s meeting.
Ha Suh, an IUSD teacher, said “a lot of teachers have personally felt like when an altercation happens, they’re kept in the dark about it and not really being given the full transparency that they deserve.”
The teachers’ association also conducted a survey of Inglewood teachers and found 84.6% of the 123 respondents said there were safety concerns at their work site.
James Morris, IUSD county administrator, said the safety and security of students and staff are the district’s highest priorities. Morris added that the district is aware of the teachers’ association’s concerns and is working with its leadership and district administrators to “evaluate campus safety comprehensively.”
“This includes reviewing current protocols, identifying areas for improvement, and ensuring that appropriate measures are in place to support a safe learning environment. We value the voices of our educators and are committed to ongoing collaboration to address these concerns and strengthen safety across all campuses,” Morris wrote in an emailed statement to The LA Local.
School officials gave an update to ongoing projects at the Nov. 5 board meeting, which include installing security cameras at each active school site. The project consists of 10 cameras that have cloud-based monitoring, according to a presentation from the district’s director of facilities and construction. This project is expected to be completed in January 2026 and will cost about $600,000.
