“We look forward to the opportunity to inform the court of the serious effects that these continued sickouts have on the district, its students and their families at the hearing on Monday”, she said.
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In response to the sickouts, an attorney for the school district asked a judge to issue a restraining order and preliminary injunction to force teachers to stop sickouts and return to work, according to court documents filed Wednesday.
A teacher’s group in Detroit is threatening another large-scale sickout on Thursday.
Wednesday’s protest is the largest by Detroit teachers yet.
Ann Mitchell, administrator of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, said some teachers have 45 kids in a class, far over the national average, which ranges from 15 to 23 students per class, depending on grade level, according to federal data.
Teacher organizations began tweeting some of the conditions their teachers encountered in Detroit schools. President Obama is in MI for an auto show and plans to talk to Detroit’s mayor about the teachers’ complaints. But he’s just really rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
A spokeswoman for Detroit Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment. Bureaucrats are destined to fail, no matter how hard they try.
The district said on Facebook that staff members were expected to report to work as usual.
While many view the auto industry’s resurgence as an important victory for the perennially declining Detroit, educators have a much different story to tell.
Zdrodowski said there would be no class Wednesday in 88 schools, about 90% of those in the system.
In the last eight years the district has been run by four different state appointed emergency managers.
“We’re having huge success, we are finally getting at least some attention to the problem we are going to have to continue on with the strike, if we are going to get real solutions by the governor – which really is to give us back our schools – no more emergency manager now”, said Conn. The Detroit Federation of Teachers reported that three of these have already been met in a letter of agreement DPS emergency manager Darnell Earley signed Tuesday.
“Things have been happening for so long, and I think teachers felt like they had no voice”, Lacetia Walker, an instructional specialist in special education, tells the Free Press.
Earley was in charge in 2014 when the catastrophic decision was made to stop sourcing tap water from Lake Huron and switch to using corrosive water from the Flint River to save $500 million over two years. Whoever was to blame, Flint still faces a serious health crisis and the costly, complicated task of cleaning up its water and possibly replacing damaged water pipes across the city.
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Gov. Rick Snyder pushed lawmakers to pass bills to overhaul Detroit’s school district during his State of the State speech. Over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend the hashtag #SupportDPSTeachers trended on Twitter in the United States as educators in the Motor City posted dozens of shocking images of building code and safety violations at schools. “The Detroit Public Schools are in a crisis”, he said.
