The first teacher strike in district history is underway at Portland Public Schools, with the teachers union insisting that teachers need higher pay, smaller classes and more planning time.
With roughly 3,500 educators on strike, nearly 43,000 students are shut out of school.
“I feel energized,” art teacher Kelly Merrill said as he stood in front of César Chávez K-8 School with his second grade daughter. “I am frustrated that it doesn’t seem like the district is listening to what our needs are.”
How long the strike might last is unknown, though sources have pegged the likely duration as three days to two weeks -- a long time for students and families, particularly those without access to technology for online instruction or child care for young children whose parents can’t work from home. Teachers will forgo pay every day that they strike.
There is a yawning gap of at least $200 million between what teachers are seeking and what the district says it can afford without having to make deep and painful cuts in the years ahead, whether through layoffs, fewer instructional days, closed schools or a combination of the three. The two sides will not meet again to negotiate until Friday, which means schools will close Thursday too. Friday was already a day off for students and had been scheduled as a teacher professional development day.
Merrill said more planning time is a high priority. He has to get to school early to prepare for back-to-back classes that range from kindergartners to seventh graders, he said. And as a parent, he wants smaller class sizes for his daughter, he said.
Any contract would have to pass muster not only with a majority of the union’s roughly 3,500 teachers but also with the school board, whose members have said they are determined not to drive the district into a deep financial deficit.
The district has offered cost-of-living-adjustments that would boost teacher salaries by nearly 11% over the next three years, plus $3,000 bonuses for first-year teachers and special education teachers. That represents a modest gain from the district’s original offer of a 7.5% cost of living raise over three years, but it is still only about half of what the union is seeking.
On Tuesday, district officials offered an extra 40 minutes per week of planning time for elementary school educators, up from the current 320 in the current contract and the 400 minutes that they had previously put on the table.
Union negotiators did not offer a counterproposal on Tuesday, said Jonathan Garcia, chief of staff to Portland Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero.
Revi Shohet, a special education teacher at Bridger Creative Science School in Southeast Portland, walked a picket line Wednesday. ”We’re fighting for the schools our students deserve,” she said. “We came back from the pandemic and a lot of kids have experienced a lot of trauma, they’re very anxious. ... Portland is a very expensive city to live in, so the cost of living is an issue, but what we’re really fighting for is better conditions for our students and our teachers.”
Amy Estep, a clinical social worker who has worked at the Pioneer Special School Program for 20 years, said, ”I think there’s been a lack of funding for education for a long time, so I think what we’re feeling on the floor and in classrooms is a lack of making education a priority. I think coming out of COVID, kids are definitely more emotionally dysregulated ... Students are having a hard time learning and staff need support.” She called for more funding and more planning time.
And, Estep added, ”Teachers, we deserve to have a life where we can go out to eat or we can go on vacation. It’s just not a living wage in Portland. I went to the grocery store on Sunday and had $7 in my checking account. It’s rent, utilities, I have kids in college. I feel as a professional I deserve to have a little better financial stability.”
Second grade teacher Grace Groom, a member of the district’s Community Budget Review Committee, said she believes there is more money available for the union’s priorities.
“Why is more money not going directly to schools to serve students?” she asked, noting that central office staffing has increased amid an enrollment decline.
District officials say an estimated 85% of the district’s budget is spent on its employees, so there are few other places to go to come up with enough money to award far bigger raises.
The Oregonian/OregonLive asked an independent expert, Laura Anderson, associate director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, to review the district’s budget. Anderson agreed with PAT’s contention that the district has added administrative staff at a faster pace than classroom teachers over the last few years, suggesting that there might be savings to be found there.
But her back-of-the-envelope math was that meeting the union’s demands would require cutting the equivalent of 288 teachers from somewhere in the budget. “Is there enough room in here to save all of the 288 jobs — are there enough other categories you could cut from to make up that money? Not really,” she said.
Kathy Paxton-Williams, who teaches English language learners at Kelly Elementary School, said the school has one of the highest concentrations of students who do not speak English as a first language. Her students come from Russia, Ukraine, Central America, Mexico, China and Vietnam, she said. Paxton-Williams said she stays at school every night until 6 or 7 p.m, just to get through the grading and lesson planning she needs to do to help her students with complicated learning and emotional needs, though her paid workday ends at 3:30 p.m.
”I want to do my job well and serve the kids well,” she said. “There is just not enough time.”
Her colleague, fifth grade teacher Miles Hartfelder, is in his second year of teaching at Kelly. His students were feeling a mixture of nervousness, uncertainty and excitement about being out of school for an unspecified amount of time, he said.
As a newer teacher with less seniority, Hartfelder acknowledged that he could be vulnerable if the district had to make cuts to its budget as a result of negotiations. But he said he was buoyed by a wave of support from parents, felt valued by his building administrators and was confident in the union’s position that there is money to pay teachers more.
With schools closed, the district is offering free grab-and-go meals on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. The meals, available for anyone ages 1 to 18, are being distributed from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at about half the district’s schools.
Other school districts around the state, including Salem, Hillsboro and Medford, are also close to an impasse with their own teachers unions.
Gov. Tina Kotek urged the Portland Association of Teachers this week to stay at the bargaining table, rather than strike. She expressed skepticism that the district could meet all the demands from its union without going into deficit spending.
“Going out on strike is not in the best interest of students or families,” the governor, a big supporter of labor unions, said Monday.
Merrill, the César Chávez art teacher, said he is “not too concerned” about his daughter being out of school for a few days. But he said, after a week, it would be “hard for her to get back. It’s almost like starting the year over.”
Oregon’s U.S. senators weighed in Wednesday. Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden urged the union and district leaders “to continue bargaining in good faith.”
“Over the last three years, our educators have strived to maintain a quality, equitable education program for our children through the enormous difficulties of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the pair said in a statement. “They have been underpaid and overstressed, and we strongly affirm our support for Portland’s educators exercising their right to strike for an equitable collective bargaining agreement.”
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
Listen to the Beat Check with The Oregonian podcast episode released October 25, 2023, where education reporter Julia Silverman and City Hall reporter Shane Dixon Kavanaugh answer reader questions about the teacher strike:
-- Julia Silverman; jsilverman@oregonian.com
-- Sami Edge; sedge@oregonian.com
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