The first honor at the action-packed Awards Dinner on Saturday night at the CFT Convention was the Raoul Teilhet Award for UTLA 1521 member Janet Davis, a kindergarten teacher, who has worked on teacher credentialing issues, particularly advocating for better pay and working conditions for Early Childhood Education and dance teachers. 

Davis, said Julie Van Winkle UTLA AFT Vice President and AFT 1021 President, is many things besides a great teacher and unionist, including a California Institute of the Arts graduate and an accomplished bass player.

“She has an innate desire to help whenever she can, and she’s even willing to wade through tomes of rules and procedures to help people figureout solutions to really complex problems,” Van Winkle said, “She’s done a lot of work behind the scenes to make UTLA successful, and she does it with such love and compassion.”

Davis’ son, Ivan FinkJohnson, accepted the award on his mother’s behalf since she couldn’t be there. He talked about coming home past his curfew as a teenager and finding her asleep at the computer.

“She would do that every night,” he said, “because she understood that helping to organize teachers was one of the most important things that a person can do with their life.” 

His mother knew the importance of relationships, FinkJohnson said, and she wanted everyone she worked with— classified, parents, students and teachers —to be heard.

“I remember the No Child Left Behind era when so many systems worked to create all these standardized tests and at the core of what they were doing was dehumanizing, not only teachers, but kids,” he said. “She worked so hard to make sure that everybody, everybody she came in contact with, felt like a human, and that their voice mattered.”

Next up, for the first ever Luukia Smith Classified Champion Award, named after, you guessed it, Council of Classified Employees President, Carl Williams, came up to the podium with Smith. 

“The reason I’m here with Luukia is that Luukia didn’t want to read about an award that’s named ‘Luukia,’” he said to laughter, going on to tell the crowd that at the last convention, people unanimously decided to institute the award to honor Smith’s 18 years of service, including being the first classified Secretary-Treasurer of CFT. 

The inaugural recipient of the award is Janet Eberhardt, who has been a paraeducator with San Francisco Unified for 40 years and has sat on the United Educators of San Francisco Executive Board for more than 30. Smith, after saying how well deserved the award was, pointed out that in addition to her work with her local, Eberhardt has also been Northern Vice President of the Council of Classified Employees for 12 years.

Eberhardt said in spite of being used to public speaking because of her work, she still got nervous at occasions like this. In keeping with her generous nature, she spent a lot of her time on stage thanking others — her CCE and UESF colleagues; her 96 year old mother, who gave her the (useful) advice to not to eat before she spoke so she wouldn’t have anything in her teeth; and her daughter, who had texted her that morning to say she would do great and she deserved the award. 

“It has been a long journey, but a rewarding one,” she said. “I have always practiced and led with the five p’s of advocacy. These are my five p’s that keeps me going: persistence, perseverance, patience, passion and possibility.”

Following this, Nelly Vaquera, president of the Pajaro Valley Federation of Teachers, won the Mary Bergen Women in Education Award

Radhika Kirkman, grievance officer of the PVFT, said Vaquera’s actions speak louder than her words. Vaquera became president right before the pandemic, and Kirkman said she supported the members throughout that confusing and unsettling time, and during her term, members have won salary increases of about 25 %. 

One of six children, Vaquera said she learned to be an advocate from her single mother, and she is proud of the work she and her colleagues do.

“Our community is predominantly Latino, predominantly immigrant, predominantly second language learner, and they don’t typically feel that they have a place at the table,” she said. “The last couple of years, as the PVFT has stood strong in our position for ethnic studies, our high school students are recognizing that they too, have been oppressed by the system, and they have learned to harness their voice. They are the ones that really helped us at this last trustee election cycle to win the seats that we won. They have been empowered, and they have shown up at every single board meeting since October 2023.”

Before working in education, she was a designer on a theater production team, and Vaquera compared that to union work. 

“You can’t put on a theatrical show in silos,” she said. “It all comes together, and then you have the most magnificent piece. That is like 

this work because we all lift each other up.”

Jason Newman, president of the Los College Rios Federation of Teachers, gave out the award named after his former colleague, Dean Murakami. It went to Los Angeles Faculty Guild AFT 1521 President James McKeever, who Newman said is laser focused on social justice, with a fierce dedication to students.

Like Eberhardt, McKeever started by thanking people — his mother, a refugee from Hungary who died at 58; his father, a drug dealer; his brother, “the nicest person in my entire family” who died at 36; and his grandfather, an artist and boxer. 

His biggest thanks went to Bill Dusenberry. When he was 13, McKeever ran a gambling operation at his junior high, and Dusenberry asked him to coach sports to kids at the park. Some parents, particularly the White ones, didn’t want him to, McKeever said, calling him “thuggish” (this without knowing about the gambling). They had a community meeting, and Dusenberry listened to what the parents had to say. Then he told them they could have their money back — but McKeever would stay on as coach. 

This changed things for him, McKeever said. 

“No one had ever stood up for me like that,” McKeever said. “In that moment, I thought I have to do something to show Bill that his trust in me was worth it. I started coaching, and I’ve been coaching ever since.”

He literally wears his politics on his sleeve, McKeever said, with Malcolm X’s and feminist scholar bell hooks’ tattoos on his arm. The tattoos were done by a former student, McKeever said, adding that he adores his students.

He told the crowd oppression is intersectional. 

“Donald Trump and Elon Musk do not care about the White people in this room or the White people who are working for Amazon. They only care about rich, White heterosexual males,” he said. “We have to remember that, and we have to work together. This is our civil rights movement. In this moment, we have to be willing to get in good trouble, and I’m not saying that we just need to talk about the rhetoric of good trouble. We have to get in good trouble.”

He ended his speech encouraging a long view.

“We must build a movement for change that may not be realized by us in this room but will create a better world for our children and grandchildren,” he said. “We will win this fight because we are right, and justice is on our side.”

Finally, the highest CFT honor, the Ben Rust Award, went to Kent Wong, a CFT Vice President, the founding president of the Asian Pacific Labor Alliance, and author of books on the labor movement, including Asian American Workers Rising. For decades, Wong was the director of the UCLA Labor Center. 

CFT President Jeff Freitas, who introduced Wong, said under his leadership, the center secured a $15 million allocation for a permanent home for UCLA’s James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center.

“Kent also led the statewide campaign to secure $13 million annually to secure permanent funding for the three existing labor centers at UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC Merced, the two Occupational Safety and Health Centers at UCLA and UC Berkeley, and to launch six new labor centers at UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and UC San Diego,” Freitas said, pausing to thank Wong. “This represents the largest expansion of labor centers and labor studies history ever.”

Wong called himself a product of the CFT, saying he walked picket lines with his teachers at UTLA when he was in junior high. He told members that education workers lead the resistance to this administration. 

“Trump and the billionaires who support them will never gain majority support in this country. They represent those who hold on to white supremacy, racism, sexism, homophobia, corporate greed and the destruction of our planet for naked profits,” he said. “The CFT proudly stands with the vast majority of people in this country, who support quality public education, who support the fundamental rights of workers to form and join unions, who support economic, racial, gender and immigrant justice, and support the future of our planet.”