Wild Cat Strike

Dear Friends,
If you are paying attention to the emails coming furiously back and forth, you can't help but notice that the current Superintendant is intent upon breaking the union and has no interest in negotiating in good faith. She uses her office of public affairs communications through the email to explain her anti-union activities to teachers and staff who may or may not understand the contract in an effort to supersede the union. If you have gone to the Seattle School District's website and evaluated the current proposals by the Seattle School District, they are intent on clumsily gutting the previous contract and inserting willy nilly language about the 5 year strategic plan and the District Improvement Plan and the Continuing School Improvement Plan while till leaving in the language about Academic achievement plans and transformation plans. If you took the time to evaluate our WASL scores over the past 10 years you would also see continued improvement year after year which would suggest that there is no reason to be gutting the contract and starting over in the way the Superintendant intends. These are not friendly or collaborative rumblings from the district and they are certainly being done without the consent of our collective bargaining agency or meaningful input from BLTs. As we look forward to the coming negotiations it appears that the Superintendant is intent upon steam rolling over the union and based on their preparation and the SEA's lack of preparation for what was coming their way, it is not hard to imagine that the SSD will be getting its way in these negotiations. We will get nothing except reduced wages and more liability for improving student performance, while the district will get a sense of limitless power. Perhaps it is time to let the superintendant know that we, the employees of the Seattle School District, are out here and we have not only been doing a good job based on improving test scores but that the way we work in Seattle is through collaboration not confrontation. Perhaps, we should consider a wild cat strike and leave our posts right now and let the Superintendant figure out how to run her school district without us. Perhaps if she sees that her confrontational ways are non-productive now and will actually honestly invite our Collective Bargaining Agency to the table to have meaningful input, we might avoid an extended Strike at the open of the new year. Based on how things are going, she simply doesn't care what we have to say.

SHMUEL