'Five-Alarm Crisis': US Has Shortage of 300K Teachers, School Staff
COLUMBUS CITY SCHOOLS PROFESSIONAL
Ron DeSantis and some of the other right-wing officials who have been leading the GOP's assault on the dignity and autonomy of teachers and librarians with censorship laws and book bans are scrambling to address the staffing crisis they helped exacerbate by lowering professional standards. "Also weighing on teachers are a growing number of school shootings," CNN noted.Īs Common Dreams reported earlier this month, Florida Gov. history, racism, and LGBTQ rights have left districts across the country grappling with burned-out educators and catastrophic teacher shortages," The Washington Post reported Monday.Īlthough pay is not a driving force in the Columbus strike, new research by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the "teacher pay penalty"-or the difference between how much teachers make compared with their nonteacher college-educated counterparts-reached a new high in 2021. "Two-and-a-half years of pandemic-throttled schooling and a recent escalation of culture wars around what teachers can say on topics such as U.S. Not far away in York County, Pennsylvania, meanwhile, teachers recently reached a tentative agreement with the school board on a new contract just days after threatening to strike. The union wants the board to use federal money." "Our Columbus City School students deserve a commitment to modern schools with properly working heating and air-conditioning, and smaller class sizes, and art, music, and P.E."Īccording to CNN, "The school board wants to ask voters for more money. "This strike is about our students," said Johnson.
Roughly two weeks earlier, the CEA said in a statement, "the school board walked away from the bargaining table."ĬEA member Courtney Johnson, a 21-year veteran of Columbus City Schools, told CNN on Tuesday that improved pay is not the union's focus. teachers at the elementary level, and functional heating and air-conditioning in classrooms, as well as adequate planning time, a cap on the number of class periods during the school day, outsourcing positions to private-for-profit corporations from outside the community, and recruiting and retaining the best educators for Columbus students." The CEA's notice of intent to strike cited "disagreement over learning conditions such as smaller class sizes, full-time art, music, and P.E. With no quick resolution in sight, "free school lunches, and breakfasts for the next day, will be distributed in grab-and-go containers each school day at 25 locations," The Columbus Dispatch reported.
"We will continue fighting until we have safe, properly maintained, and fully resourced schools in every neighborhood," Fuentes said at a Monday news conference, suggesting the possibility of a long fight similar to the one that occurred last year in Minneapolis. National Education Association (NEA) vice president Princess Moss joined a picket line, walking alongside others calling for "schools our students deserve." Their teachers, librarians, counselors, and other staff, meanwhile, plan to keep picketing for improved learning environments and expanded opportunities for art, music, and physical education-something they began to do Monday morning at school buildings across the city. With no negotiations currently scheduled between the two sides, the district's 47,000-plus students are poised to start the school year online Wednesday.
COLUMBUS CITY SCHOOLS FULL
"It is with a full understanding of the sacrifices that students, parents, and teachers will make together to win the schools Columbus students deserve that CEA members overwhelmingly rejected the board's last, best, and final offer tonight and intend to strike," CEA spokesperson Regina Fuentes said at the time. The Columbus Education Association (CEA) announced Sunday night that more than 94% of its nearly 4,500 members had voted to reject the last offer from Columbus City Schools, bringing about the union's first work stoppage since 1975. For the first time in 47 years, teachers and support staff in Columbus-Ohio's largest school district-went on strike Monday to demand better working and learning conditions, exemplifying mounting discontent over the sustained and intensifying attacks on public education that have led to increasingly understaffed and ill-equipped classrooms.
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