Mesa County, teachers need your help. Please wear red and be a body in the room this Friday night or Saturday afternoon, 5/17 or 5/18. You don’t have to understand what’s going on, you don’t even have to pay attention. Bring knitting, bring a book, eat the snacks provided at the back of the room! Wear Red for Ed and stand (or sit) in solidarity with teachers so the school board and the community see that what teachers need is important and we should be listened to! Please, even if you can only come for an hour, only for 30 minutes, we need you! Read on to find out what we are fighting for.
Additionally, email the school board members! I will put their emails at the bottom of this post. Tell them to LISTEN to teachers, to stop their blatant union-busting tactics, and to DO THEIR JOBS instead of just giving lip service about “how much they appreciate teachers” and “how much they want what’s best for students.” Actions speak louder than words.
More than anything, we need the community to speak up for us. All I see on Facebook message boards, from uninformed parents and community members at public comment meetings, and even in the newspaper is how entitled teachers are indoctrinating children, acting like glorified babysitters and whining about needing raises even though they only work 2/3 of the year. This is propaganda spewed by ignorant or, more harmful, downright hateful people doing everything they can to discredit teachers and public education. Talk to any teacher in this district for five minutes and you will see this is not true. Share this post, talk to your friends and neighbors, stick up for us on social media, PLEASE! This is the biggest way you can help us. (That and packing the room on negotiations nights.)
Here is the scoop:
The school board has once again shown how little they value teachers by sending a lawyer to the yearly contract negotiations instead of attending these meetings in person. Instead of fulfilling their obligations as school board members, they are pawning it off on the district’s lawyer (which the district, through your tax dollars, is paying for) even though no actual decisions can be made without the board members, so there is a lot of waiting around wasting time with the lawyer acting as the go-between. How disrespectful to the teachers and the community they are supposed to represent and work with!
The board has been blatantly lying in mass emails to teachers and community members, saying that the teacher’s union, MVEA, is holding up negotiations because they keep fighting for raises. This is not true. It is the school board stopping progress by saying NO to everything and refusing to compromise even when presented with very reasonable requests. The union is insisting that since the board blatantly says “No” to paying half the union president’s salary, as they have done since the 1970’s with no problems until this year (and this board), they are willing to compromise by paying more of the pres’s salary IF the board will “give” us more rights in exchange. The board has said “Absolutely not” and will not compromise. We NEED a full-time MVEA president to go into buildings and support teachers, to attend meetings, to write emails, and to make phone calls, all on our behalf. If we don’t have this full-time president, someone who teaches full-time (and likely has a family and other commitments as well) will be scrimping bits of time here and there to do SOME of these things, and that’s not in the best interests of teachers. Trying to get rid of the union president by cutting their salary and/or making it impossible for them to do their job is literally step one of documented anti-union activity, and we have seen this in multiple districts across Colorado. Those teachers in those districts are not in a good spot now because of the dissolution or weakening of their union. Don’t let that happen to your friends and neighbors here in Mesa County! The school board has GOT to compromise with the union on behalf of teachers and staff.
The union wants reasonable standard-of-living pay increases for all teachers–this is not a raise, this is an attempt to keep up with the cost of groceries, rent and house payments, gas, and everything else that we have all noticed rising in the last couple of years. We need to include those honored teachers, counselors, and psychologists who have been working for the district the longest–the board wants to deny standard-of-living increases to those who have worked 20+ years and have “topped out” on the pay increase scale (which we had to fight tooth and nail for last year during negotiations). This is not only unfair, it’s disrespectful of all the hard work they’ve put in for decades.
To be honest, I am disgusted and hurt by the school board’s actions. They can take all the photos they want cutting ribbons, planting trees, having lunch with cute little kids, and whatever else you might see on social media, but when it comes down to brass tacks, they’ve made it clear they don’t care about teachers or students because they’re actively undermining everything we’re trying to do that’s right. WE HAVE TO MAKE THEM CARE. Show up Friday and Saturday wearing red, share this post, talk to people you know, and email the following people. Thank you for your support.
School Board President Andrea Haitz
Andrea.Haitz@d51schools.org
School Board Vice President Will Jones
willj@d51schools.org
School Board Secretary Angela Lema
Angela.Lema@d51schools.org
School Board Director Jose Luis Chavez
joseluis.chavez@d51schools.org
School Board Director Barb Evanson
barb.evanson@d51schools.org
The Revolutionist 