Teachers United: Why We All Need a Teachers’ Union
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
Labor unions, and teachers’ unions in particular, often get a bad rap in modern social and political discourse even though a recent poll showed a majority of Americans believe unions have a positive effect in the United States.
When the Douglas County School District Board of Education’s majority members voted to oust Superintendent Corey Wise and to undermine the District Equity Policy, the union representing DCSD teachers and paraprofessionals (Douglas County Federation, or the DCF), received a fair amount of coverage in the local media outlets. The presence of DCF President Kevin DiPasquale in many news stories and television interviews may not have seemed so unusual to the casual observer. After all, one of the many functions of a labor union is to act as a voice for its members. A primary instrument for unions is collective bargaining, which is the process of negotiating terms of employment between an employer and a group of workers.
But what the average Douglas County citizen may not know is that, even before the four new DCSD board directors were elected, the DCF’s ability to advocate for teachers, paraprofessionals and other essential district employees had already been severely undercut.
Since 2012, when the DCSD BoE, whose makeup was very similar to what we have today, dissolved the CBA with DCF, our teachers have not had a collective voice with the district. Every other major school district in Colorado has one. The lack of a fair means of negotiation between DCF and the DCSD has contributed to the extremely dire situation in our schools.
As a former DCSD teacher who was an active member of the DCF for more than 30 years, I was proud of my union, not only as an advocate for our teachers and staff, but also for the students, parents and community as a whole. The benefits provided by teacher unions are mostly taken for granted in this era when labor unions are routinely demonized by conservative extremists.
In the DCF, the union dues we paid protected more than just our salaries and working conditions. The union also offered many other benefits including access to programs through the national branch of the union, the American Federation of Teachers, the AFT. These programs served to train and mentor teachers using the most up to date educational research and best practices available. The union did this with the blessing and, in many instances, with the cooperation of DCSD Central Administration. Many other community-building programs and ideas from the union are no longer permitted in DCSD schools, even when they would not cost the district a penny.
But something much greater has been forfeited since DCF lost its collective bargaining rights with the district. With the DCF presence effectively banned at all levels, teachers have lost their collective voice and their ability to be a part of the decision-making process in their schools and for their students. They are not being treated as professionals who are devoted to the nurturing and the education of young minds. Like healthcare and other essential workers, our teachers have borne the brunt of the pandemic, while support for them at every level has been stripped away. One can imagine every one of our hardworking DCSD teachers going through each school day feeling frustrated, sad and hopeless if not completely demoralized. A recent survey by the DCF found that 61% of members surveyed in DCSD are considering leaving the district by next year, while 43% indicated they may be leaving teaching altogether.
At the national level, in another survey from the AFT, parents identified several top education problems they were very or fairly concerned about, including several directly related to school staffing issues:
Shortages of guidance counselors, social workers, and nurses (75%)
Students not getting enough individual attention (69%)
Inadequate funding for schools (68%)
Teachers not being paid enough (65%)
Shortages of full-time and substitute teachers (65%)
DCSD is experiencing “all of the above.”
How can we as a community address these deficits? How can we provide our teachers with the resources and respect they deserve? It is not an understatement to say that our formerly great school district has been brought to its knees by the actions of a few. And the ensuing chaos will only cause further damage to our entire community. If Board President Mike Peterson really wants “time to heal” from the chaos that has been inflicted, the first step is to allow our teachers to have a collective voice by reinstating a collective bargaining agreement and permitting the DCF to openly serve as a voice for the professional teachers of DCSD.
