Yuma teachers rally at West Wetlands
About 200 Yuma County teachers rallied at the West Wetlands Park near downtown Yuma to protest Gov. Doug Ducey’s proposed raise for educators.
The Arizona Educators United is seeking votes this week on whether teachers would support a walk-out. So far, teachers have been “walking in” to their contracted jobs. “The way the vote’s going is whether or not we support a walkout regardless of when it happens. The vote is not do we want to walk out right now,” said teacher Pat Miller, the local group’s spokesman and teacher at Ron Watson. “We need to wait to find out what comes of the 20 by 2020 plan. We just want to find out how much support there is for a walk-out or if we need to reevaluate how we go about trying to get our demands met.”
The group wants better teacher pay and an end to tax cuts that undermine education, among other things, said Ana Ortega, who teaches first grade at McGraw Elementary.
“We want competitive pay also for all education support paraprofessionals, our bus drivers, our cafeteria cooks, our custodians, our health clerks,” said Ortega, who is a former Yuma County Teacher of the Year. “We want a permanent teacher salary structure which includes annual rais-
es.”
Longtime educator Deb Drysdale, who retired earlier this semester as the principal at Carver Elementary, said she wished a movement such as this had been around when she started teaching in 1976.
“We’ve never had a moment like this. This is the moment. And the teachers now have strength of numbers and they have strength of national support and they need to make this move ... they need to not hesitate and they need to get out and they need to say, you know, enough is enough.”
Dan Zarbock, social studies teacher, academic decathlon coach and assistant coach in cross country at Cibola, said he’s been teaching and coaching for 25 years.
“I’ve seen a lot of decline in what’s coming into the schools, with money from funding from Arizona. They’ve cut the budget drastically in the past 10 years, and we are not just talking about pay raises,” he said.
Teachers said the future is in their hands, as they are educating future leaders and citizens.
“That’s what we’re walking in for, because education matters, and we want what’s best for our students,” Ortega said, “because in our hearts, and we do what we do, because students comes first.”
Zarbock said that the group also wants the state to come up with an alternative and sustainable way to fund education.
“We have to talk about our support staff, our school funding, a sustainable way of funding our schools, because we are increasing in enrollment in this state,” he said. “More people are moving here, yet we are one of the lowest-paid states, overall, for education, and we are losing teachers in droves to all the surrounding states.”
Drysdale said teachers are often not even able to afford the basic premise of the American dream — a home.
“We’re educating all the children and we’re getting not enough money to even have, you know, buy a house. This is ridiculous,” she said.
Miller said he had moved from another school district near Tucson to Yuma to be closer to family, but he cannot afford the insurance, and has chosen to go without. Insurance costs for the district went up 8 percent last year, but teachers got just a 1 percent raise, he noted.
“Insurance there (near Tucson) I could afford, even though the pay was lower here because it would come out to, I think my wife figured it out, 34 percent of my take home,” he said.
In February, Miller’s son’s appendix burst, and because of the “pay and everything, I didn’t have insurance and I’m now faced with, I believe it’s over $35,000 in medical bills.”
According to data from the Auditor General’s Office compiled by the Arizona Republic, Yuma Elementary District One has the secondlowest average teacher salary in the state of Arizona at $34,730. However, the salary and benefits schedule from the district’s website puts first-year teacher pay at $36,998 (which includes Prop 301 pay and other incentives).
“And I’ve uprooted my family from Missouri to move here five years ago,” Miller said, noting that there are about 2,000 teaching jobs open in the state. “And if things don’t change, it may be 2,001 teachers.”
Ortega and Miller both said the decision on whether to go along with a walkout has not been made, and that local teachers are just turning in their ballots on the issue.
“If we have to be assertive, to get what we want for our students, because again, they come first in our hearts, we’re going to do what it takes to get them better resources and better education for them,” Ortega said.
“It’s just up in the air right now,” said Miller. “That’s ... because it’s all being done on social media, there’s a lot of open ends, especially for those of us this far out.”