PAT Strike : Fingers Crossed

Sunday November 26 was a bit of day.

The weekend’s exciting episode of Late Stage Capitalism Administrative State vs Living Wage and Value for Labor featured a “Tentative Agreement” between PAT and PPS in which the kids go back to school with a two hour late start tomorrow and we lose about half of winter break and tack a couple of days on the end of school (and some other extra days).

PAT’s public statement is positive, so I’m congratulating them on a hard fought battle, and hoping that it gets voted in. The teachers got COLA across three years, frontloaded with biggest increase in Y1. Not as much as they asked, but better than initially offered. There are other things (planning time, special education, environmental safety) on which I’m not really best positioned to opine. I think don’t they (meaning all of us) got what was needed with class room sizes.

But here’s the deal: teachers have to go back into classrooms they haven’t been in since 10/31 with very short notice, and students are coming in 2 hours behind them. Not just the teachers but the other bargaining units (custodians, nutrition, educational aides, and administrators) who have been working this whole time are being asked to give up their winter vacations without bargaining. December is going to be joke, since any family that already had vacation planned is going to be [double middle finger PPS] out of here.

PPS has been saying epically shitty things about teachers for days (I’m not forgetting their bullshit 9pm Wed before Thanksgiving mudsling for a Long Time). Now they’re blithely promising report cards, conferences, and so forth, with no recognition that these things take time to accomplish and teachers have been locked out of the classroom and grading systems for a month, and have to spend weeks making up lost instruction.

Bear in mind also, that the District could have agreed to all of this without a strike, just by not being dicks. And there’s no word that they’ve cut a dime of the excess admin costs as part of this deal.

I’m going to try my damnedest to give some grace in this next month. It’s going to suck because I’m tired. My baseline of coping spoons is naturally pretty low. The kids are going to readjusting after a month of no class. And I’m still really really angry. Angry that my kids got a month of uncertainty instead of classes, pissed at missing at least one important teacher conference, and outraged that thousands of hard working professionals are going to have to go back into the classrooms with battle fatigue and unresolved rage against a system that has unquestionably tried to break their will for months. That’s some B.S.

Also, the governor (who was the state house majority leader until 11 months ago) and the state legislature bear enormous responsiblity for this disruption and institutional dysfunction for having willfully starved public education for decades. In doing so they are perpetuating long running institutional racism and structural tax dodging by wealthy corporations.

[pics from last Wednesday’s action at city hall and Tuesday’s march]