Sarah Lahm
Editor’s Note: On February 7, the St. Paul Federation of Teachers announced that a new strike date has been set. Union spokesperson, Patrick Burke, says that teachers and support staff will walk off the job on February 13, four days earlier than originally planned, “if no settlement is reached in ongoing contract talks with the St. Paul Public Schools.” According to Burke, the union is making plans to create “Safe Sites” if the strike goes forward, in order to serve marginalized families who rely on the schools for such things as meals and childcare.
On January 31, as a wintry sunset painted the St. Paul sky in bands of orange and yellow, members of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers filed into a downtown hotel meeting room.
Teachers and school support staff, decked out in the cherry red t-shirts and hats of their union, were there to cast a historic strike vote. By midnight, the results were in: more than eighty percent of the members voted yes. They are prepared to walk the picket line in order to demand, as the union says, “The schools St. Paul children deserve.”
St. Paul Public Schools and union leadership now head into mandatory mediation. If no favorable agreement between the two parties is reached by February 17, the approximately 3,400 members of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers will go on strike for the first time since 1946. That strike, seventy-two years ago, was the first time in U.S. history that an organized group of teachers walked off the job to demand better wages and working conditions.
The 1946 strike lasted six weeks and featured a list of issues that many education activists today would recognize, including cramped classrooms, stagnant and unequal pay for staff, and poor facilities for students. School choice was also a factor back then, according to an article in Workday Minnesota about the strike, which noted that the lack of funding and resources for the St. Paul schools could be attributed in part to “the fact that a sizeable portion of St. Paul families sent their children to the many parochial and private schools in the city.”
The 1946 strike lasted six weeks and featured issues that education activists today would recognize: cramped classrooms, stagnant and unequal pay for staff, and poor facilities for students.
See Vang, a St. Paul teacher, would likely empathize with the teachers who walked off the job in 1946. Vang insists that she and her 3,000 plus colleagues “know what our kids need.” Class sizes for kindergarten through third grade at St. Paul schools are not supposed to exceed twenty-two students per teacher, Vang notes, and yet they often hover around twenty-eight.
Sarah Lahm
St. Paul teacher See Vang, who says she and her fellow educators “know what our kids need.”
“I know a first grade teacher, right now, who has thirty kids in her room and limited support,” Vang tells The Progressive, calling this an impediment to a key goal of the union: creating “racially equitable schools.”
Large classes hurt kids, she says—especially kids of color, or kids who need more support. So far, district officials have not agreed to the union’s contract negotiation proposals, which includes a request for class sizes to be capped at seventeen students per teacher for younger students, a number Vang says is supported by research. Smaller classes, she argues, would help teachers provide the kind of comprehensive academic and emotional support marginalized students need to do well in school.
“We rely on teachers so much,” Vang says, saying “so much is on their shoulders.” She pauses to mentally calculate how many students she thinks she has impacted during her twenty-four years at St. Paul Public Schools. The numbers quickly climb into the hundreds, as Vang notes that she is now working with the children of her former students.
Our community needs to have the same level of investment in education as the teachers themselves do, she says, and it can start by supporting the union’s call for more classroom-based resources.
Like Vang, special education teacher Shannon Jax has spent her entire career working for the St. Paul schools. Since 2001, she has been both a classroom teacher and district special education coach, supporting teachers and students in the autism program. One item on the bargaining table this year is “weighted caseloads” for special education teachers. Instead of working off of a numbers-only ratio, which Jax says the district supports, the union is advocating for a formula that takes actual children into account when figuring out how to place teachers.
One item on the bargaining table this year is “weighted caseloads” for special education teachers. “We want a ratio based on student need,” one teacher says.
“We want a ratio based on student need,” Jax insists, noting that a blanket staff to student number is “not equitable.” Some buildings or students can handle higher ratios, she said, but some cannot, and Jax says she thinks teachers should be driving this decision, not spreadsheets. (Research from the Minnesota Department of Education seems to support Jax’s conclusion regarding the ineffectiveness of pre-determined caseload and class size ratios.)
Fewer caseloads for special education teachers could allow more time for them to collaborate and get to know students. Jax is willing to go on strike because, after months of contract negotiations with the district, she believes administrators “are not willing to engage in conversation about what students need.”
St. Paul school board member Mary Vanderwert disputes the idea that the St. Paul Public Schools has been unwilling to sincerely negotiate with teachers. In an interview with The Progressive, Vanderwert says there simply is no money available to meet the union’s demands around any increases in staffing.
“We can’t afford any more staffing, but we do want to maintain our current levels,” Vanderwert insists, pointing out, as others have, that funding for public education in Minnesota has dropped precipitously since 2003.
“Our costs are rising,” Vanderwert says, but “our funding barely increases. Every year, we have a deficit and cuts to make.” Still, she believes that the district has been listening to the union and acting responsively by compromising on a class size proposal and pulling other contentious items off the table.
“Our costs are rising,” a school board member says, but “our funding barely increases. Every year, we have a deficit and cuts to make.”
Both the district and the city’s school board—which includes candidates backed by the union in November's election—say they are working to stop a strike. On February 1, St. Paul Public Schools published a message to families on its website explaining that the district and the unions have been in contract negotiations since August 2017. With a possible strike looming, the district warns parents that schools could close and the free breakfast and hot lunch offered to students would no longer be available.
Although the St. Paul Public Schools’ website does refer to contract negotiations as being centered on an employment contract that is tied to discussion about nuts and bolts items such as “wages, benefits, and other work-related issues,” it also offers ongoing updates to union-district talks. This includes a stated commitment from the district to press forward with the “mediation sessions through the weekend in an effort to avoid a strike,” as well as recent proposals around such atypical contract items as the expansion of a restorative justice program designed to address racial disparities in discipline data.
In an email sent to members on February 1, St. Paul Federation of Teachers President, Nick Faber, reasserted the union’s broader priorities. While hoping that compromises can be reached before the February 17 strike deadline, Faber had this to say:
. . . [O]ur students can’t wait. Our English Learners and our students receiving special education services need more supports now. We must focus on educating the whole child and providing adequate mental health supports for all students. Our students deserve lower class sizes so educators can build lasting relationships with them and their families. We have to expand restorative practices so that we are working with students instead of pushing them out of our schools. And we need our paraprofessionals—including our Educational Assistants and School and Community Service Professionals—to be valued and treated with respect.
Vanderwert, a St. Paul school board member since 2016, would probably agree with Faber’s emphasis on serving students well. For her, though, this is a bigger conversation that goes beyond district-union contract negotiations. She recalls a time when Minnesota was famous for investing deeply in its public school system and thinks the state has lost its way, thanks to years of underfunding special education, for example.
Today, after decades of budget cuts and deficits, this is the message Vanderwert hears: “Our kids are no longer important.”
Sarah Lahm is a Minneapolis-based writer whose work has appeared in The Progressive and other local and national publications.