Arizona teachers will begin voting on whether to strike on Tuesday. The voting will go on for three days.
Although Gov. Doug Ducey (R) announced a proposal to raise teacher pay by 20 percent by 2020, which state lawmakers will debate this week, teachers say his proposal doesn’t address education cuts over the past decade or large classroom sizes across the state.
Teachers are leaving the state for higher salaries and smaller classroom sizes and there are too many teacher vacancies as a result, teachers told ThinkProgress’ Elham Khatami last week. Last year, there were 8,600 teacher vacancies and 62 percent of those vacancies were vacant or being taken by people who couldn’t qualify for a teaching certificate, according to the Arizona Republic.
Arizona had the most devastating cuts over the past decade, according to a 2017 Center for Budget and Policy Priorities report on education funding since the Great Recession. State funding per student fell by 36.6 percent between 2008 and 2015, more than any other state.
On April 11, thousands of teachers participated in a statewide walk-in to ask for more education funding and higher salaries. In addition to the 20 percent raise they requested, they want to implement a permanent salary structure, offer competitive pay for educational support staff, stop new tax cuts until the state’s per pupil funding reaches the national average, and restore education funding to 2008 levels.
Arizona Educators United, a coalition of teachers, administrators, and education support professionals, organized the vote. Derek Harris, a member of the coalition’s leadership team and a band teacher at Tuscon Unified School District, said the group wants to see support from all over the state, according to Tuscon.com.
He said organizers want something more than a simple majority, but they don’t have a firm threshold for a vote. Teachers will vote before and after school hours. One of the members of the coalition leadership team, Kelley Fisher, a kindergarten teacher at Las Brisas Elementary School, showed teachers how to make a secure ballot box in a video on the group’s Facebook page.
“I am a creative arts teacher so I had to include some glitter but that’s not required,” she added.
Teachers on the coalition’s leadership team named the reasons why the governor’s proposal is not sufficient, such as the lack of detail on where funding for the raises will come from. Teachers also said a proposal should include more education funding to improve students’ quality of education.
“My students deserve to have repairs on their building and working plumbing and holes in walls patched,” Harris said in the group’s Facebook video published on Monday.
Harris laid out a plan for teachers over the next week for the voting process and next steps over the weekend, such as community organization meetings across the state.
“You will be breaking into canvassing teams, organizing house meetings, and really moving into the next step to get the community on our side,” Harris said. “So this week, let’s try to stay very attentive to what’s going on. We’re saying this week is #RedAlert, because if the legislature does something funny we want to make sure that you’re paying attention and ready to do anything that may need to be done.”
This article was originally published at ThinkProgress on April 17, 2018. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Casey Quinlan is a policy reporter at ThinkProgress covering economic policy and civil rights issues. Her work has been published in The Establishment, The Atlantic, The Crime Report, and City Limits
