Detroit Protest Shuts Schools As Obama Visits

CNN reported the protest aligns with President Barack Obama’s visit Wednesday, when he met with Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and celebrated the revival of the city’s automobile industry.

Obama is due to arrive in Detroit in the afternoon to speak to a United Auto Workers gathering.

Officials at the district, which faces debts over $500 million, told the Detroit Free Press they had no other option but to call off classes at most schools.

In the last eight years the district has been run by four different state appointed emergency managers. Wednesday’s closures mean that “44,790 of the District’s 46,325 students lost a critical day of instruction”, she said according to the Detroit Free Press.

The sickout is the second one staged by Detroit teachers in January and comes on the heels of a successful social media campaign to raise awareness of the problems in the schools. 11 closed 64 schools.

The sickouts have not risen to the level of an all-out strike, because such a move is prohibited by MI law. The school district agreed to demands on staff meetings, sick leave accrual and a labor-management committee on curriculum, the teachers union said.

“Calling it unethical, knowing what he’s done in Flint and the condition of our schools, it was the straw that broke everything”, said Vanessa Dawson, a sixth-grade English teacher at Paul Robeson Malcolm X Academy.

“If they are getting pay cuts, and don’t have what they need in the classrooms, the only way for them to be heard is to take a stand”, said Tanisha Murray, whose daughter attends a closed foreign language immersion and cultural studies school.

A spokeswoman for the Detroit Public Schools, Michelle A. Zdrodowski, said it’s “extremely important” the court help to resolve the issue. “The whole next generation relies on it”, Cass Tech teacher and activist Steve Conn told CBS affiliate WWJ. “We were not encouraging people to go out today, but people are feeling it’s the time now to do big actions to show what they’re feeling”.

It has left many teachers anxious that Detroit Public Schools will go out of existence, said Bailey, the teachers union leader.

Before going to Detroit, Earley served as the emergency manager in Flint. The corrosive Flint River’s water extracted lead from old pipes into the local water supply after Earley approved a switch from Detroit’s water. 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.

Duggan hopes to have the first 20 school buildings fully inspected by month’s end and all of them wrapped up in about three months, according to Roach, his spokesman.

The teachers held another sick out to highlight the poor conditions and low pay they’ve had to endure within the district, which is deeply in debt. “Teachers are fed up and have had enough”.