Nicole McCormick has been a music teacher in Athens, West Virginia, for ten years and an involved member of the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA) for most of that time.
The West Virginia teachers aim to remain an example for the rest of the country.
“As a music teacher, you talk to everybody,” she says. “You talk to the cooks, the custodians, the aides, every single teacher because all their kids come to you.”
All that contact made McCormick a natural building representative, plus, she says, “it fit with my personality.” She spent years going to state assemblies and national assemblies, and eventually became co-president of her local. But none of that prepared her for what happened in 2018, when teachers went on strike across the state.
She’d become involved with building for the strike when Jay O’Neal, another teacher from Charleston, West Virginia, reached out to her about helping him launch a Facebook group for teachers. From there, things had spiraled quickly.
And now, two years later, McCormick is running for statewide union vice president, alongside O’Neal and three other members of the West Virginia United Caucus, which they created after the 2018 strike.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, as teachers battle for the safety of themselves and their students—and against looming budget crises and privatizers eyeing their schools—the West Virginia teachers aim to remain an example for the rest of the country.
Since the strike, McCormick stepped back into leadership of the Mercer County Education Association. She also traveled around the United States to speak with other educators and unionists about the power they built through the strike.
During the strike—and particularly the moment when the rank-and-file teachers decided to stay out, rejecting a deal struck by the leadership of the unions—she says, “I realized that my voice was important and that my intuition was correct, that I didn’t have to wait on someone to tell me what to do. I began to trust myself.”
And her time on the road confirmed that feeling. “I wanted to be able to be a representative of all educators, but especially the mothers and the women that we currently don’t have in the upper echelon of state leadership,” she says.
“We formed the caucus as a way to continue the grassroots movement and mobilization that we saw during the strike,” says Jenny Craig, another member of the slate of candidates running for WVEA executive committee, “and as a way to not lose the cooperation and solidarity that we had with the other education unions.”
The teachers’ unions in the state—WVEA and AFT-West Virginia—don’t have collective bargaining rights, so before the strike they acted as lobbying organizations. But, Craig says, “We recognized that we didn’t have to wait for anyone to tell us to do that, that we really needed to take autonomy and that we are all the union. We ran as a slate because we all have the same vision for our union.”
The teachers come from different parts of the state and different political backgrounds, says Leslie Haynes, also running for the union’s executive committee. She laughs, “I’d heard about these scary people who wanted to take over the union.”
Then she got a call from O’Neal. “He had founded a caucus and he said, ‘I’d like to talk to you about it’ and then, I realized that he was those people. He sent me materials about what the caucus stood for. I was like, ‘This is exactly what I had been saying.’”
Soon, O’Neal was convincing her to run for office, and the caucus was having an internal election to decide between candidates for each position. “It was the neatest election that I had ever experienced because there was no animosity,” she says.
That friendliness, unfortunately, did not carry over to their campaigns for leadership.
“There has been some negativity about our campaign,” Haynes says. “I love the WVEA. We have wonderful people in leadership there now. It is difficult to run this campaign without them taking it personally, but it is not a personal attack. We just have a different vision.”
In 2018, teachers and school staff were active, taking control, acting as one big statewide union rather than two separate unions that often compete for members.
O’Neal, who is running for president of the union, highlighted that vision. “We saw what power was and we want to be powerful all the time, not just nine days in 2018,” he says. “We believe power comes from us talking to each other and being empowered at the county level.”
Both Craig and O’Neal spoke of how quickly the “55 United” slogan of the strike—referring to all 55 counties of the state standing together—fell apart after the strike.
In 2018, teachers and school staff were active, taking control, acting as one big statewide union rather than two separate unions that often compete for members. They were making proactive demands, calling for progressive taxation and particularly taxes on the state’s coal and gas industries.
Such broad demands will be even more necessary, the teachers note, as austerity looms again in the wake of the coronavirus and its economic fallout.
In January 2019, the WV United caucus organized a walk-in protest to educate other teachers and the community about the push for charter schools and diverting public funding to private school vouchers. The teachers launched another strike in February for two days, and temporarily killed a bill allowing charters and vouchers, but it was revived in a summer session and pushed through.
Looking back, O’Neal says, “It felt like as unions we forgot what gave us power.” He wonders now if they’d threatened to refuse to work in the spring, they’d have been able to hold off the charters.
A lobbying mindset, O’Neal tells The Progressive, leads to the union confusing access with power. “Just because we can meet with the governor or talk to legislators doesn’t mean we actually have power to make them do anything,” he says.
The election would normally have taken place at the union’s delegate assembly at the end of April, but because of the virus, it’s happening in a more drawn-out virtual process. They’ll know the results by June 12, according to O’Neal.
Because of the virus, campaigning involves lots of phone calls, emails, and online forums where people can write in with questions and the candidates can answer them live. “We wanted to talk to as many people as possible because we saw in the strike that is what helped us build up strength,” O’Neal, who had originally aimed to travel to many of West Virginia’s 55 counties, adds.
Campaigning, he says, means listening more than they talk, particularly with the pandemic upending teachers’ work. Teachers across the state are struggling with distance learning, finding that it exacerbates the problems and inequalities that they were already grappling with. Some students don’t have reliable Internet connections, as rural broadband access remains sparse.
It can be hard to figure out how to reach these students. Haynes has given out her cell phone number, and had a student call her just to chat. For O’Neal, online teaching—he teaches eighth grade social studies—hasn’t been too bad, but he’s talked to teachers whose subjects are nearly impossible to teach remotely, from driver’s ed to welding.
And for McCormick, the music teacher, trying to hold online classes is “a disheartening disaster.” She’s had to come up with creative ways to “keep them involved with it and keep music in their mind.”
Like other teachers around the country, the WV United teachers find themselves trapped between a rock and a hard place, the danger of reopening schools only to see COVID-19 infections spike again or being forced to maintain online education indefinitely.
“There is a big worry that people are going to use this excuse of lack of funding to push privatization,” O’Neal says. “I think we’re going to see more of a push from these virtual charter schools or even just online learning programs that are going to come in and say, ‘We can save you X amount of dollars by moving your stuff online’ and as we’ve seen in the past with cuts for schools, it is really hard to get that back.”
Win or lose the union election, the WV United teachers don’t plan to stop the work they’ve been doing.
The freeze on public employees insurance expires soon, and the teachers expect that the crisis will intensify calls for budget cuts. Instead, they’re pushing for tax increases to fund not only their insurance, but things like expanded broadband for all. “We see teachers and unions across West Virginia able to take that on if we stand together and fight for all working people,” Craig says.
The caucus has also organized educational Zoom calls for teachers and the community. “We had a wonderful phone call with the West Virginia Center of Budget and Policy, looking at what the COVID-19 crisis could mean for our schools’ budgets and our students and social service programs,” Jenny Craig says.
In this moment the teachers are also feeling appreciated in a new way, Haynes says. “It is funny, all these parents saying, ‘I thought I could homeschool and definitely not,’ and ‘Teachers are worth gold.’”
Win or lose the union election, the WV United teachers don’t plan to stop the work they’ve been doing. “If we’re not successful, we’ve at least started these conversations and that gives us the chance to find out what the members want out of their union,” Haynes says.
McCormick agrees: “No matter the outcome of the election, my dedication is and will be to the union. I’m honored to be able to be running with the caucus slate. I feel privileged to be a West Virginia educator and a WVEA member.”