#Red4Ed: A grassroots civics lesson
50,000 protest at State Capitol; third day of teacher walkouts expected Monday
It started as an idea among a dozen educators: Teachers would wear red shirts on a Wednesday in March and post photos of themselves on social media as a sign of solidarity and a statement that a decade of budget slashing, low pay and crumbling schools must
More online: See photos and videos of teachers and their supporters rallying for higher education funding at the state Capitol at education.azcentral.com. end. Organizers watched as it grew into a tsunami of grass-roots activism, culminating in the largest teacher walkout in recent U.S. history, with more than 1,000 schools closed and 850,000 students affected. See how #RedForEd started, and what’s next:
Seven weeks before leading the largest teacher walkout in recent American history, Noah Karvelis and Dylan Wegela silently stood in amazement.
It was the night of March 7 and the two teachers, now among the most recognizable faces of the Arizona Educators United group, reflected on what happened earlier that Wednesday.
Thousands of Arizona’s teachers and school employees showed up to work wearing red, then posted pictures about it on social media. Karvelis and Wegela had helped coordinate the grassroots effort just days before.
“We both just looked at each other and said, ‘Wow, this is incredible. We really have something here,’” Karvelis said.
The simple demonstration, Karvelis and Wegela said, underscored the desire of Arizona’s educators to mobilize in their fight to reverse $1 billion in cuts to Arizona public education following the recession and secure better pay.
What started as an idea among nearly a dozen educators culminated Thursday in the closure of more than 1,000 schools impacting 850,000 students, and a sea of more than 50,000 protesters at the Arizona Capitol.
Teachers are expected to hold a third day of walkouts Monday, as the Legislature possibly considers a budget that includes teacher raises and other education leaders introduce an income tax hike ballot proposal.
It has been 54 days of emotional protests and outcries — a rollercoaster of unprecedented and outspoken political activism among Arizona’s teachers documented on social media threads with one indexed keyword: #RedForEd.
‘We’re no longer ashamed’
The grassroots campaign was born out of years of quiet resentment over diminished school resources.
The median pay for Arizona elementary school teachers is $44,990, according data tracked by the education nonprofit Expect More Arizona. The organization ranks Arizona 49th in the nation for pay, when adjusted for cost of living.
The stigma of being a broke teacher has vaporized, melted away by a tide of frustrations and newfound empowerment that crosses political lines for most educators.
“People have come out of their shell and are no longer ashamed to share the uncomfortable parts of education,” said Catherine Barrett, a master teacher in the Phoenix Union High School District and an Arizona Educators United organizer.
“We don’t have to hide that we’re making these low salaries that really diminish our profession,” Barrett said. “We’re no longer ashamed because more people are coming out.”
In the weeks that followed the March 7 demonstration, a Paradise Valley teacher went viral after posting her $35,490 salary on Facebook, questioning in a long post to her friends why she even needed her college degree.
A Pendergast school district specialeducation teacher broke into tears while protesting at the Capitol, telling reporters that, at age 37, she had to move back home with her parents and couldn’t afford to send her daughter to college.
Thousands of others have commented and posted on Facebook and Twitter their tales of outdated textbooks and dilapidated buildings, ballooning classroom sizes, second and third jobs and the postponement of starting families because they can’t afford it.
Now, those tales are the common thread holding together what Wegela calls “an education revolution” that spans across Arizona and into other states such as Colorado, West Virginia and Oklahoma.
Finding their way to Arizona
Several of the teachers leading the Arizona Educators United group are outsiders to Arizona’s education landscape.
Rebecca Garelli, 30, and a teacher in the Alhambra Elementary School District who introduced the idea of “walkin” demonstrations, came here in July from Chicago, where she participated in the 2012 teachers’ union strike.
Wegela, 25, a Michigan transplant, is in his second year teaching in the Cartwright School District.
Karvelis, 23, is a second-year teacher in the Littleton Elementary School District from Pecatonica, Illinois — population 2,195. While at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he applied to teach at schools in Alaska, Colorado, Montana, Wisconsin, New York, Maine and Utah.
Karvelis wanted to leave home for “an adventure.” In early 2016, a few months before his graduation, a professor suggested Arizona, where schools were years into a persistent shortage of qualified teachers.
Karvelis said he knew “literally nothing” about Arizona’s education landscape. He’d soon find out.
The art teacher at his school, Tres Rios Service Academy in Tolleson, quit early into the year and was never replaced. Her students for much of the year were split into other classes, including his.
A first-year teacher, he lived paycheck-to-paycheck.
“It was frustrating,” Karvelis said of his first year. “Everyone’s first year is difficult, and my experience was as well. It was a tough year.”
Karvelis and the art teacher both were singular data points that helped tell the severity of the state’s teacher landscape — one rife with with educators who are young and still learning how to be effective, and teachers who quit abruptly.
More than one-fifth of 46,000 Arizona teachers in 2016-17 were either in their first three years of teaching or lacked the basic qualifications, such as formal training.
A survey by the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association found 465 teachers abandoned or resigned their positions within the first four weeks of that school year. The following year, that figure would nearly double.
Wegela, also unaware of Arizona’s ongoing funding issues, came to Arizona for “a new experience” and because his brother lives here.
“The second that I got here, I could tell there was a lot of frustration and animosity among teachers,” Wegela said.
A movement started on Facebook
If years of internal frustration is the fire fueling the #RedForEd movement, then the creation of the Arizona Educators United private Facebook group — now with nearly 52,000 members — was the match that lit that fire.
As educators in West Virginia were on their fifth day of their statewide walkout, Karvelis replied to a tweet about the walkout by Joe Thomas, president of the Arizona Education Association.
Karvelis said in his reply that “most of my colleagues that I have spoken with are supportive of a strike -- especially with the current momentum and WV’s success. Several have been talking about it for months (even years) now, as well. What are your thoughts?”
Thomas advised them to coordinate “local actions” that might help gauge whether educators in Arizona could mobilize the way they did in West Virginia.
Barrett, the Phoenix Union teacher, had been monitoring the discussion and sent Karvelis a direct message. An educator for 16 years, she was frustrated by the six reading teachers she’s seen leave over the years. She told Karvelis in their private Twitter chat that the schools in her district could get on board with a demonstration.
They spent time editing a flyer on Google docs. That weekend, a group of them created the Arizona Educators United Facebook page.
Days later, the first #RedForEd event was underway.
Karvelis said the moment “was just me in the place at the right time. The messenger could’ve been anybody because there has been that much energy” among educators,
‘A misstep could set us back’
Among the organizers, there is a constant recognition that the momentum of public support they’ve gathered — the support that helped give them the confidence to set a walkout date — could be lost with any potential misstep.
That recognition is “certainly on the minds of the organizers in the group,” Karvelis said.
“A misstep could set us back for maybe a year, maybe 10 years. Who knows? It could derail the entire movement,” he said. “We remain confident because we know we are fighting a good fight.”
The teacher-organizers plan many of their strategies in hours-long meetings and conference calls at the end of school days.
The group has mostly relied on a strategy dependent on gathering input from the group of educators on the Facebook page. They’ve posted polls, studied comments and organized a statewide in-person walkout vote.
It’s a method that has drawn both praise and criticism among members along the way.
Many have said or commented that the strategies have been important for getting a clear understanding on where most people lie on issues, such as what educators wanted to demand from state leaders and a poll asking educators whether they supported walking out.
Others, including several educators who from the start of the movement have expressed enthusiasm in walking out, have commented that strategies such as internal polling waste precious time and momentum for action.
Karvelis said the method has helped organizers when they’ve felt “lost.”
An example that Karvelis offered was when organizers first began discussing the logistics of a walkout, such as how would school districts handle the disruption, and how would organizers “authorize” the walkout.
Not all educators have been eager to walk out.
Twenty-two percent of 57,000 educators and school employees voted against walking out in a poll that helped influence organizers to set a walkout date.
The main goal for the organizers has always been clear: getting Arizona education funding levels back to 2008, when the state spent $924 more per student than it does in 2018. But the path toward getting there, not so much.
The process has moved fast. The organizers, most with little to no experience in political organization, have learned on the go.
Within four weeks of the March 7 demonstration, thousands of educators and their supporters gathered at the Capitol after school hours, and AEU organizers announced their list of five demands of Gov. Doug Ducey and the Legislature.
Less than a month after that rally, tens of thousands of educators and school employees walked out, closing 1,000-plus schools in nearly 110 districts and charters, impacting 850,000 Arizona students.
“That’s been one of the challenges with this moving so quickly. You just want to put one foot in front of the other, but at the same time you’ve got to look three moves down the road,” Karvelis said.
Educators with the #RedForEd movement want to restore a decade of cuts to education funding. They want immediate 20 percent teacher raises, which would still put them below the national median. They want competitive pay for support staff such as teachers’ aides and cafeteria workers. They want guaranteed annual salary increases. And they want no tax cuts until Arizona reaches the national average in education spending.
The total price of educators’ demands would likely cost the state billions.
Organizers under the microscope
As the #RedForEd movement has grown, so has the public scrutiny of some of its members.
Some Republican lawmakers and critics of Arizona Educators United have accused some of its leaders of having partisan intentions.
Rep. Maria Syms, R-Paradise Valley, in an op-ed column published in The Arizona
Republic’s editorial pages, called Karvelis a political operative who moved to Arizona to carry out a socialist movement.
During a speech on the floor of the Arizona House, Syms said she wrote the column to show the political leanings and methods of Karvelis.
An article on the conservative website Breitbart.com and The Broomhead Show mined past social media posts from Karvelis and Derek Hall, a Tucson teacher and AEU organizer, apparently to emphasize their left political leanings.
Rep. Noel Campbell, a Republican lawmaker who has proposed a temporary education sales-tax measure, said this week he believed the educator movement was “partisan, to a point.”
“I think they (organizers) want the Republican majority out of the House and the Senate and they’ll use this strike to influence the public opinion,” Campbell told The Republic when he discussed his proposal, “and we’re trying to solve the ... problem.”
Gov. Doug Ducey in a radio interview days before he announced his #20by2020 teacher pay raise proposal referred to the #RedForEd movement as a “political circus” being coordinated by a political operative, seemingly in reference to Karvelis.
Karvelis is the campaign manager for Kathy Hoffman, an educator and Democratic candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction. Hoffman has never held public office.
An online resume shows Karvelis volunteered on the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign while in college. He also canvassed in 2017 for Knock Every Door, which describes itself on its website as “a volunteer-led organization created in the wake of the disastrous 2016 election.”
On the same of March 7 #RedForEd demonstration, Thomas, the Arizona Education Association president, held a news conference endorsing David Garcia, who is running as a Democrat for governor.
The timing of the announcement came under criticism from many Republican political observers who’ve associated the endorsement with the #RedForEd movement.
Arizona Educators United is nonpartisan and leaders have said it will not endorse any political candidates.
The AEU group has been allied with Arizona’s teachers’ union. Karvelis said the AEA has provided the group of organizers with, guidance, infrastructure and resources.
“They’re threatened by the power that educators have right now,” Karvelis said of his critics.
“It’s an attempt to kill the messenger and destroy this movement. But the movement’s far too strong for that. That’s been one of the most encouraging things. Educators have had enough.”
Leading the way
A group of Arizona Educators United organizers led Thursday’s march of 30,000 people to the Arizona State Capitol on the first day of the walkout.
Garelli, Wegela, Barrett and Tucson teacher Derek Harris held a large #RedForEd banner as they led marchers on a two-mile walk to the Capitol.
The crowd stretched about a mileand-a-half. At every block and corner, it seemed, supporters clad in red stood near sidewalks and intersections with smartphones in hand and their children next to them. They wanted to document the moment.
Once at the Capitol, organizers took turns delivering speeches about the collective power of the movement, repeatedly telling the crowd of educators and supporter that it would be up to them to bring the investment in public education that they’re seeking.
“If we don’t stand up and bring a change, the people sitting in those chairs right there will not do it,” #RedForEd organizer Noah Karvelis said from the rally’s stage, pointing in the direction of the Arizona House and Senate and Governor’s Tower.
Rachel Johnson, 45 and a teacher at Mansfeld Magnet Middle School in Tucson, wanted to go back to school Monday. Her students needed her. She told them Wednesday they were the reason she was walking out.
Thomas on Friday announced the walkout would continue at least through Monday.
“I feel like this movement picks up speed every minute,” Johnson said.
Republic reporters Richard Ruelas and Dustin Gardiner contributed to this article.
Reach the reporter at Ricardo.Cano@gannett.com and 602-444-8236. Follow him on Twitter: @Ricardo_Cano1