Seattle teachers OK contract

Striking Seattle teachers and supporters march on a picket line Tuesday, September 15, 2015, at Greenwood Elementary School in Seattle.

Unlike the thunderous, unanimous “AYE!” vote to go on strike, the vote to ratify the agreement was more divided. For the first time ever, school psychologists, speech language therapists, physical therapists, and other support staff won hard caps on their caseloads. For the Seattle school district’s 53,000 students, the strike had delayed the start of the school year by six days.

The deal also addresses teachers’ complaints about the role of testing in schools, seeking to cut the amount of student testing and to remove links between test scores and teacher evaluations.

But compensation remained one of the most debated items before the vote.

The union agreed to a nine-percent raise over three years, which does not include the state’s mandated cost of living increase of 4.8-percent.

The two sides reached a tentative agreement during last week allowing school to begin on Thursday.

Seattle teachers voted to approve a contract between the union and its school district on Sunday.

“I really want my kids back in school, but I want it done fairly”, she said. The union represents 5,000 teachers and other employees in the school district. Phyllis Campano, the union’s VP and bartering seat, said individuals asked what they could do to guarantee more for understudies. There was not any official condemnation of teachers in Seattle, with all parents and community members either supporting teachers or staying out of the strike altogether.

Even the highest raises in the third year still don’t add up to what teachers collectively lost in the aftermath of the recession.

The teachers insisted the strike wasn’t only about their salaries. Educators had opposed that the elevated cost of living inside a city with a thriving population of well-paid tech workers was pricing them out.

“The reason there’s not enough money is the state for sure”, Thornton Creek Elementary reading specialist Cindy Deshler said.

Now union leadership is setting its sights on Olympia.

“This agreement signals a new era in bargaining in public education”, Jonathan Knapp, president of the Seattle Education Association, said in a press release. “They were voting “no” against legislative inaction on school funding”.

Union leaders say they’re next step is to put pressure on the legislature to fund public education through revenue reform.