Seattle Teachers Going Back To School After Tentative Contract Deal Is Reached

Salaries are the main sticking point with teachers saying they want to be paid more equally to the teachers in nearby school districts.

Seattle teachers will return to school with their demands met- and another city’s teachers will be taken care of through push and shove-for now.

Also, test scores will no longer play any role in teacher evaluations, and teachers will have input into how often students are tested.

Why are Seattle teachers on strike? We hate it. It’s been 30 years since Seattle struck, because it is so terrible . They did strike for one day in May this year, in an action aimed at the state government.

The strike, which left many working parents scrambling to improvise childcare arrangements, marked the first labor-related disruption of classes in three decades for Seattle’s public schools. They pointed to a statewide education funding crisis that led the state supreme court to hold the state legislature in contempt for failing to fund basic education for Washington’s children. The school organized some temporary day camps at community centers across the city.

Seattle academics had been on strike since Wednesday, September 9, 2015.

“When school starts, it’s going to be a much more powerful start”, Lehman said.

After the agreement was announced, several hundred cheering people — including children — marched with signs toward the school district office south of downtown.

Though the union’s Reprfesentative Assembly voted to recommend the contract, general membership still has to vote on the new contract Sunday.

Recess: Guaranteed 30 minutes of recess for all elementary students. He called the tentative accord “welcome news for Seattle families and students”. “It’s insane : you either have kids who are foregoing lunch to run around outside or they are just staying in the lunchroom”, Troccoli said. A lot of teachers are single parents.

A testing committee, staffed by five union members and three district employees, tasked with finding ways to reduce the impact of testing.

PTA member Ljiljana Stanojević-Peñuela organized strike support through the Facebook group Soup for Teachers. Union leaders voted later in the day to endorse the pact and immediately end the walkout.

The union stated the proposal would have pressured academics to work that additional time totally free. But that could be in part because “the district has dug in its heels on certain issues”, she said.