National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen García visited Phoenix on Wednesday to support the walkout, and said that the chaotic negotiations in Oklahoma and West Virginia revealed that there is no playbook for a red-state school strike.
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Young women carrying babies joined retired teachers as rock music blared.
The walkouts in two states are the climax of an uprising that spread from West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky.
What are teachers planning and what will happen? The proposal, which would still have left the state’s educators among the worst paid in the U.S., was rejected by the teachers union and the Arizona Parent Teachers Association after it was revealed that the plan would be paid with cuts to other state programs. There’s no end date scheduled, so it’s not clear how long classes might be interrupted. It’s the first teacher walkout in the state’s history. “Call/email your legislator and tell them to vote “yes” on a 20% pay raise for Arizona teachers”. “As they take action over the next several days, and into the future, we urge parents and all concerned Coloradans to contact state legislators to ask them to increase funding for K-12 education in Colorado”.
More than 840,000 Arizona students were expected to be out of school Thursday, according to an analysis from the Arizona Republic that tallied up at least 100 school districts and charter schools that are closing.
No laws in Colorado prohibit strikes. This is all taking place despite the fact that two Republican lawmakers in the state have introduced a bill that would punish striking teachers with fines or jail time.
Arizona teachers also staged a “walk-in” earlier this year to express their demands.
Rightly in my view, teachers feel these ads are meant to undermine the Red for Ed movement. In the 2016-17 school year, Arizona teachers made $47,403, a almost 10 percent drop from the 2009-10 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But teachers say that isn’t enough. Education funding is a big piece of the puzzle as well. In comparison, the national starting teacher salary for that same year was $38,617.
“People aren’t interested in teaching anymore because they can’t afford to live in Colorado”, Esser said. A working group of Colorado superintendents came up with the new formula, and eventually 171 of the state’s 178 district leaders signed onto it. A long line of cars moved slowly across the Spanish Colonial-style campus as parents dropped off their kids at the private high school. “Our ballot measure has a more equitable distribution embedded in it, and it also shows the voter intent that our school finance system be very equitable and student-focused”.
He said that won’t occur if lawmakers support the Democrat goal of funding teacher pay hikes by adding additional revenues, whether by imposing a new levy to pay for the higher salaries or reversing some of the previously restricted tax cuts.
Brenda Lopez, who teaches fourth grade, told CNN the Baseline Road demonstrations and the walkouts aren’t about holding children’s education hostage for change.
The proposal called for a “student-centered” distribution model to replace the state’s school finance formula created in 1994.
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According to Senate Republicans the state has increased education funding from $5 billion in 2012 to over $7 billion in the 2018-2019 school year. Lee said they definitely started something. “I do totally understand the kind of rationale that brought us to this point”. If it goes into day three or four, Pima County’s largest school district may have to extend the school year to make up for lost days of instruction.
