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Seattle Education Association on strike! [1]

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Date: 2022-09-10

Seven years ago, I served as a strike captain at my former high school in north Seattle when the Seattle Education Association (SEA) went on strike. At the time, there was a host of bargaining issues, as there always are, but the central issues revolved around compensation and evaluation. We enjoyed widespread community support, from parents and political leaders alike. The strike lasted five days, and Seattle Public Schools (SPS) caved when it realized how much antipathy was directed toward them from the community.

I am now retired and have been trying to follow the issues in the local press, but I’ve found the messaging both from the SEA and SPS to be unclear. I wanted to show support for my former colleagues and find out what they see as the primary issues at stake in this strike, and so on Thursday and Friday I spent a few hours on the picket line to talk to my former colleagues.

To a person, they said that compensation was not the main issue, though they did support pay increases for some of the lowest paid staff members, instructional assistants (IAs) who support teachers with special education and English language learning (ELL) students. Rather, they said that their main concern is with SPS’s plan to radically change the inclusion approach for placing special education and ELL students in mainstream classrooms. In a nutshell, SPS wants to eliminate standalone special education and ELL support classes and place these students in mainstream classes with little or no support in the form of IAs or additional co-teachers.

I should say that most of the teachers I talked to want a phased-in approach to more inclusion, as long as SPS provides additional staff to support them in the classroom. SPS’s approach is simply to dump these students in the classroom without support. Why? It would seem that SPS is doing this as a cost-cutting method, except that the SEA claims that SPS is sitting on enough funds to hire additional staff. It certainly can’t be for the sake of the students because no student benefits from being thrown into an overwhelming environment without adults to help them.

My conversations around the ELL program were most telling. In fact, SPS started to implement its radical inclusion plan last spring when it began turning away students from the World School, where students new to country received instruction in basic English. Some of these students arrived, well into the school year, at my former high school, where there were inadequate resources to teach them basic English. This year SPS simply eliminated ELL course numbers so that all ELL students, regardless of their language ability, had to be placed in mainstream classes, without additional translators, IAs or ELL co-teachers. My former school has been scrambling to provide workarounds for these students.

How can SPS get away with this? ELL students are the children of immigrants, some of them only recently arrived in country. Who will advocate for them if not the teachers?

One of the things I’ve found most disturbing about this year’s strike is the lack of support from parents. I understand that many parents are burned out from coping with Covid for over two years. They want school to start on time, in a normal way. In that respect, they are in agreement with the teachers, who can’t understand why SPS wants to implement a radical inclusion plan just as they’re recovering from two years of disrupted teaching and learning.

My hope is that the parent community will realize that SPS’s approach to inclusion does not have the students’ best interests in mind. My hope is that they can find the energy to support educators in their strike and force SPS to come to its senses.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/10/2122013/-Seattle-Education-Association-on-strike

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