In Oklahoma, bosses are helping teachers go on strike
No across-the-board raises in 10 years for educators there
Earlier this month, Melissa Abdo visited a class of future schoolteachers — education majors at Oklahoma State University.
“How many of you are considering teaching in Oklahoma?” she asked them.
Of the roughly 20 students in the class, a single hand went into the air.
“I don’t think Oklahoma wants me,” one student told Abdo, a board member for Jenks Public Schools in suburban Tulsa.
Abdo said this week that she was embarrassed for Oklahoma, where teachers haven’t had an acrossthe-board raise in 10 years, leaving them with some of the lowest pay in the nation.
So she and members of other school boards across the state have taken a highly unusual step: They’re helping their workers go on strike.
When teachers — or for that matter, workers in any field — strike, it’s usually a showdown with the bosses. That’s what happened when teachers in Chicago went on strike in 2012 to force better contract terms from the nation’s third-largest school district.
But in Oklahoma — as with the recent nine-day teachers strike in West Virginia — the traditional battle lines between workers and management have gotten blurred as both sides take aim at a bigger target: the state Legislature.
Across the state, teachers are getting a boost from superintendents and school boards as they prepare to walk off the job Monday unless the Legislature significantly raises their pay.
At school board meetings, superintendents have given presentations to board members and curious parents about how a teacher walkout would work — and how they could support, and not oppose, a strike that would affect hundreds of thousands of Oklahoma students.
“It is unusual for any kind of strike, but it points to just how awful the situation is,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation’s largest public-sector unions. “What you are seeing right now is a fight for public education, because the school boards are saying, ‘How are we going to get teachers for this and the next generation of kids?’ ”
At least 172 Oklahoma school districts, with 500,000 students, are prepared to close for at least a day if teachers go on strike, according to a survey released this week by the Oklahoma State School Boards Association and other state education groups. A total of 48 school districts, with more than 230,000 students, said they were prepared to close indefinitely.
Shawn Hime, executive director of the school board association, said that among the state’s 513 districts, he had not heard of a school board that had rejected the idea of a walkout.
“Our board members, while they’re not leading the strike … they understand the frustration of our teachers,” Hime said, noting that Oklahoma’s low property taxes force schools to rely more heavily on state funding than their counterparts in neighboring states.
Starting pay for a teacher in Oklahoma with a bachelor’s degree is $31,600 — a figure set by the Legislature. The state’s average salary for public school teachers is $45,276, lower than in any state except Mississippi and South Dakota, according to the most recently available data from the National Education Association.
The Oklahoma Education Association has said a strike will begin unless lawmakers guarantee $10,000 raises over the next three years. The last teacher’s strike in the state occurred in 1990 and prompted a conservative backlash against new taxes.
“I feel like I’m in ‘Back to the Future,’ ” Janet Dunlop, the superintendent of Broken Arrow Public Schools, said at a March 12 meeting of the suburban Tulsa district, which gets more than 40 percent of its funding from the state.
Dunlop recalled how she joined in as a student-teacher during the 1990 strike. “I remember the angst I felt, and I felt like I was almost betraying what I fought so hard to do.”
Now, even with a job that would normally place her on the other side of the table during labor negotiations, she still sounded like a teacher ready to march on the state Capitol in Oklahoma City and demand legislators raise pay.
“I think that we all would agree: No one wants this to happen,” Dunlop said of a strike, according to a video recording of the meeting. “But you also get to a point where you don’t believe the promises (from state lawmakers) anymore and you need it to happen.”