The battle is happening, for me, in my daughter's school district. I wrote about here on Sunday, and reposted in on Monday, because I thought it needed more attention.
I still think the issue of Capistrano Unified School District needs more attention as parents, teachers and students think about the vote to take place tomorrow on whether teachers will strike.
And yesterday was the student "sick out" planned by parents, not the teachers, as some parents have accused the union of organizing. But, it was parents who wanted the board to know, we care about our teachers.
An estimated 3,880 students across the Capistrano Unified School District, mostly at the elementary level, stayed home Tuesday as families staged a one-day “student strike” to protest a 10.1 percent pay cut imposed on teachers by the school board.
Attendance at the district’s 35 elementary campuses was down 16 percent, hovering at an 80 percent attendance rate versus the average 96 percent.
OC Register
Of course the OC Register likes to leave out the important facts, that the main issue is that the Board of Trustees want to impose permanent pay and benefit cuts and the teachers were willing to take the compromise proposed by a mediator that included only temporary pay cuts, some lay offs and class room increases.
The issue at hand has more to do with the board of Trustees that refuses to budge and also refuses to listen to the parents. Parents do NOT want a strike. They do not want to see the teachers suffer permanent pay cuts, and the teachers understand, that just as the rest of the community has had to take on certain economic sacrifices, they too are willing to do so.
But not permanently.
Beyond the Blackboard is doing a wonderful job of covering the chaos of this ineffective board and the comments are revealing as well. People, parents to be exact, are fed up. Not just Democrats (Who are in the minority here in Orange County, CA) but Republicans and Declined to States are angry that their voices aren't being heard.
My husband put it quite eloquently actually when he came back from the Board of Trustees meeting last night. He knew that many of the angry parents in last night's meeting were Republicans and knew, as the board sat their stoic and quite unphased by the pleas of the parents to compromise with the teachers, that they finally knew what it meant to be a Democratic vote in Orange County.
So why my headline? Because, I posted my piece at a local blog, one I used to write for more often, The Republican War on Public Education. I wanted to get the word out because I felt there had been a failure by our local paper of record to cover the story fairly.
Especially since there were issues about who had funded the original recall candidates and how they were handing off a huge amount of legal work to their friends and colleagues since taking office. That there were two private organizations hell bent on using CUSD as an experiment on how to privatize the public school system through the shock doctrine. This is why there is a current recall effort. It's complicated. It's been painful for months now.
But today Gary came home from his time volunteering in our daughter's first grade class. He saw Charlotte's Kindergarten teacher and she took the time to say hello to him. She also wanted to let him know how much she appreciated the piece I wrote. She told him she read it and she liked it very much.
She told him she couldn't discuss it much because she was at school. But that alone, meant the world to me.
Damn the rec list.
A piece I wrote was being circulated among teachers and they appreciated it.
That was enough for me.
I support our teachers, I support public education. Sometimes just taking the time to write something in a local blog, especially something as contentious as this, is enough and the rec list here is merely a bubble in a world that is something of it's own making at times (Valuable, important world that mobilizes people, informs, etc. I am not undercutting it's value).
Of course I will keep writing but to know that it meant something to THE TEACHERS, means that they know how much they are appreciated and that parents are willing to fight for them.
Tomorrow night, they will vote on whether to strike. One teacher said that not only will her pay be cut 10% with the board's decision, their health care costs will double. Is this fair? Should we ask teacher's to take this kind of burden on?
Of course not.
If the teacher's strike, this means that Charlotte will be staying home. We support our teachers.