For Phoenix teacher, a fight on all fronts
#RedForEd champion balances work, family and activism
Rebecca Garelli didn’t have time to spare. The sun had barely risen over a Monday morning that came too quickly, and already she was behind schedule. There were lessons to plan and rallies to organize and three young children screaming for her in the kitchen.
But it was up to her to keep the movement going, so when yet another reporter knocked on her front door, wanting to know what life was like after April’s #RedForEd teacher walkout, she held her arms wide and let the noise wash over her. “Welcome to chaos,” she said.
A cry came from the kitchen. She let her husband handle it and speed-walked into their bedroom, where a desk in the corner was covered with how-to books — “How to Jump-Start Your Union” and “Inside the West Virginia Teachers’ Strike” — and a laundry basket in the closet was filled with red.
“I don’t wear another color,” she said. Garelli, 37, has worn red nearly every day for the past few months, ever since she created a Facebook page that ignited Arizona’s buildup of teacher frustration, then helped stoke it into #RedForEd. The color is part protest, part display of a newfound power.
A year that saw America’s teachers speak louder than ever before elevated Garelli into a strange new position: She’s a classroom teacher with a statewide profile.
But to her sixth-grade students, she’s still Miss Garelli, the teacher who described herself on a paper name card as “loud” and “funny,” who demands respect but often drops to student eye level to explain a complicated science concept. The school principal, Jennifer Bunch, describes her as “a special person.”
This is Garelli’s second school year teaching middle-school science at Sevilla West, a west Phoenix school 30 miles from her Gilbert home. It was the only school district in the Valley that offered her anything close to what she had made back home in Chicago.
So every day, she awakens before sunrise, blitzes through breakfast and crams onto the freeway, inching through an hourlong drive into work.
“Almost ready,” she said just after 7 a.m., finishing an English muffin and filling a Contigo with enough coffee to last through the day. Wet hair clung to her face. She pulled on a pair of comfortable shoes, to offset the classroom’s hard floors.
Garelli headed outside and unlocked her Nissan sedan. #RedForEd slogans covered the back. #EdWave2018,” the back window read. “#StillInvested.” She started the car and pulled away, with 30 miles to go.
A move, a pay cut
The car was quiet as Garelli sat in Monday morning traffic and tried to ignore the camera hovering within inches of her face, searching for something good to say about being a teacher in Arizona.
“I wish I could make something up here,” she said after a few silent seconds. “I don’t love a lot of things about teaching here, honestly.”
It was easier to name the state’s faults.
Too few teachers have too many responsibilities. Six classes a day are probably too many. Each class probably has too many students. She has no time to plan a lesson or talk with her colleagues. There is a shortage of substitutes, her textbooks are almost obsolete and almost nobody is paid what they are worth.
The state’s teacher salaries were almost low enough to keep Garelli out of Arizona altogether.
She had spent her entire life in Chicago, teaching for 13 years in the city’s public schools. She burned out. She took a job at her alma mater, DePaul University, where she helped install new standards into the city’s science classes. She enjoyed the work, and it paid well: In her final year, she earned more than $75,000.
But she and her husband, Michael, were tired of Chicago’s lake-effect winters. They had three young children and wanted to give them room to play outside.
They started saving. She interviewed at more than a dozen Arizona schools.
“On average, I was going to take a $35,000 pay cut,” she said.
In the summer of 2017, a friend in Phoenix told her about the Alhambra Elementary School District, which had a vacancy and some of the highest teacher salaries in the state. Its teachers rarely had to buy their own supplies.
The student body looked much like what Garelli had taught in Chicago: 94 percent of Sevilla West’s students receive free or reduced-price lunch, and the principal couldn’t name all the languages she heard in the hallways.
‘Eyes on me’
Garelli arrived just after 8 a.m., parking in the same spot as always. Lunch in hand, she walked through an open gate and a locked door and into Room 602, where the desks were arranged in neat clumps of four and one wall reminded students, “In a world where you can be anything … be yourself.” The students arrived half an hour later.
“Hi, I missed you,” Garelli told each one. Some of them stopped for high-fives and fist bumps.
She followed the last student into her classroom and shut the door. Garelli took attendance and handed out fliers for the soccer team.
Then she walked to the front of the room. “Eyes on me,” she said. Twenty-seven students stared back at her, waiting to hear what came next.
Surviving severe conditions
They’ve made progress. She has to believe that. Seven months had passed since Garelli catalyzed the #RedForEd movement, back before the end of her first year in an Arizona classroom. She saw with fresh eyes all that the state’s veteran teachers had resigned themselves to. Somebody, she believed, needed to say something.
“And I was like, you know what, I feel like this has to happen,” she said. “I feel like now is the time. I just went for it.”
It started with a Facebook page. Garelli created “Arizona Educators United” on March 2. Within weeks, thousands of educators had joined, and a small group of leaders emerged. Garelli, who had participated in a 2012 teacher strike in Chicago, built a step-by-step plan.
Supporters looked to her for their next move. By late April, she found herself on a stage in front of the state Capitol, leading tens of thousands of educators in a demand for more funding.
Though the #RedForEd movement ended with only part of what educators asked for — 20 percent teacher raises over the next three years, but not the restoration of $1 billion in education spending cuts — the seal had broken.
“It was worth it. Definitely,” Garelli said. “People know that they can band together and fight for something that is truly necessary. That, for me, is the majority of the win.”
But #RedForEd’s effects haven’t seeped into Garelli’s daily routine. The walkout hasn’t shrunk her massive classes or filled her cabinets with supplies. A constant time crunch reduces her days to repetition: She teaches the same lesson, the same way, to each science class.
“We’re gonna start our severe-weather project,” she said just after 9 a.m.
A map of the Atlantic seaboard flashed onto the projection screen. It showed projected rainfall totals for Hurricane Florence, which had crashed into the Carolinas and given Garelli an obvious opening to bring the real world into her classroom.
She didn’t want her students just to memorize a set of facts. She wanted them to understand what science looked like, to know that anybody could ask a question and answer it on their own.
“How many of you guys have heard the word ‘severe’ before?” she asked.
Two dozen hands shot up. Garelli pointed around the room, taking guesses and asking who agreed.
Once everybody had a turn, Garelli played a YouTube video about severe weather. Spanish subtitles lined the bottom of the frame. Garelli stalked the room and made sure every student watched. Then the video ended, the lights came back on and Garelli walked back to the front of the room. It was time for the year’s first project.
“You are going to get this lovely book,” she told the class, holding aloft a slim hardback with a green cover. In the back of the room, a student groaned.
The textbook was “Weather and Water Resources,” intended as an introduction to all things weather. Students stared down at stories of a 2000 drought in Pakistan and 1999’s Hurricane Floyd. A chart of planned hurricane names listed “Katrina” among them, assigned to a then-unseen future.
Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. The book was published in 2004.
It was the best Garelli had.
She asked students how they’d prepare for a hurricane, if one ever came to Arizona, and encouraged them to draw their own pictures, even if they weren’t any good.
And then they were out of time.
Her second-period science class was already lined against the wall.
Garelli ushered them in, offering each student a high-five or a fist bump, and reset the projector to its first slide. The same map filled the screen. Garelli started to ask the same questions, diving right back into the lesson she had already given, but the kids wouldn’t stop talking.
Garelli stopped and raised a hand. “I’m not feeling respected right now.”
The classroom fell quiet.
“Thank you,” she said, and they moved on.
‘I don’t have any resources’
Garelli chose a challenging district on purpose. Her students come from around the world, carrying their languages and their troubles into her classroom. Garelli sees herself in them. She, too, was a child of the city.
“I did not grow up with tons of money, so I understand,” Garelli said. “I can better understand where they’re coming from. How to help them.”
But nothing prepared her for third period. Garelli issued more high-fives as the students filed past, filling Room 602 with the sound of foreign languages. Twenty-one students spoke in at least four separate tongues. The students came from Mexico and Rwanda, Thailand and Central America.
Her assignment was to teach them English and science at the same time.
She arrived in Arizona without any idea she would be responsible for teaching English. The only foreign language she spoke was the little Spanish she remembered from high school.
The best she could do was scour the internet for simple worksheets, hand them to her students and wander the room, trying to spark conversation.
“I don’t have any resources,” she said. “I’m the science teacher.”
Third period started the way the first two began. The same map appeared, and Garelli asked if anybody could read it. After hearing a few uncertain answers, she passed out copies of a simple English worksheet. “Let me introduce myself,” it read at the top. Below it unspooled a list of prompts:
Hi, my name’s… I’m from… I’m a student at…
“No excuses,” Garelli said. “Everybody’s going to talk to everybody else today.”
She rolled her hands, signaling that they should start. Conversations sputtered to life. At a cluster of four desks, she knelt and watched as a boy hovered his pencil over the page.
“I’m a student at…” Garelli said. She looked him in the eye, coaxing out an answer. “What’s the name of
this school?”
The boy seemed confused. “La escuela?” “Si. La escuela.” Again he paused. He stalled. He scribbled “6 de abril.”
Twenty minutes later, he erased his answer and wrote “Sevilla West” in its place.
Garelli floated among groups, answering questions that had nothing to do with science. A girl wanted to know how to spell Justin Bieber’s name. One boy asked how to spell “Gatorade,” because it was all he drank. Another didn’t know what to do with the prompts about his father. He said he didn’t have one.
Most of the students never made it to the science lesson.
A job of perseverance
Some days, teaching becomes a job of perseverance.
By fifth period, she was drained. Her head throbbed and her legs didn’t want to move. Half a can of soup sat cold on her desk. She didn’t have time to finish it.
But the students were back, so Garelli pulled the rainfall map for the fourth and final time. She played the same video and asked the same questions. Students flipped through the same obsolete books and drew the same pictures. Garelli drank the same coffee from the same Contigo, then sent the kids to stand in the same hallway lines.
She followed them out.
A patch of shade extended onto the sidewalk, and she took it. From behind wide sunglasses, she stared until the last student disappeared into another building. Then she slumped toward the ground and let her arms hang limp.
Five classes down. One to go.
‘I want my students to succeed’
She had already left teaching once.
After 13 years, the job had lost its joy. So she took a break.
The job at DePaul gave her a work-life balance she never had in the classroom. It paid well. Her stress started to dissolve.
Arizona brought it back.
“Now that I’m back in the classroom, I’m stressed again,” Garelli said. “I’m overwhelmed.”
She felt the pressure from two sides. There was the stress of #RedForEd, of a K-12 education funding shortage. People looked to her to lead them through it. The movement could not fail. She could not fail.
Then there was the immediate stress of the classroom.
“I want my students to succeed,” she said. She saw teaching as a way to empower the next generation. Every moment was crucial.
Teaching dominates her days, and #RedForEd often claims her nights. Side jobs writing science curriculum and leading professional development workshops add spare cash, but extra hours. She slips her husband and children into the gaps.
The #RedForEd movement has shifted into a votermobilization effort for the Nov. 6 election, promoting pro-education candidates. Garelli thrived in the work. “I’m diggin’ it,” she said.
She harbored far-off thoughts of a life in politics, though she insisted there were no plans to run anytime soon.
The present demanded enough of her attention.
‘I miss you already’
Garelli sucked down the rest of her coffee as Monday’s final class, a math intervention for struggling students, streamed into the room. She unlocked a case of iPads and watched as 29 students tapped into an app called iReady, which creates customized lessons based on each kid’s test results.
The software did most of the work. All Garelli could do was ensure they made progress.
“If you need me,” she told the class, “I’m going to sit down. Come to me and I will help.”
She opened a yogurt cup and ate small spoonfuls, hoping to ease a growing headache. It didn’t work. Kids kept asking questions, and the cup sat unfinished when the final bell rang.
Garelli posted herself by the door, holding out an open hand as two lines of students walked past. “Adios,” she told them. “I miss you already.” She stuffed her papers into a bag, headed down the long hallway and dropped into her car.
A text lit her phone. Her cousin offered an extra ticket to that night’s baseball game. The Cubs, Garelli’s girlhood team, were in town.
She wanted to go, but there was too much to do. That night she had to wrangle volunteers for the weekend’s rallies and respond to a growing pile of supporters’ messages. The next day’s lesson plans were still unfinished. And she wanted to see her family.
She declined, then turned a key and started the long drive home.