The first teacher strike in district history is underway at Portland Public Schools, with the teachers union picketing in support of higher pay, smaller classes and more planning time.
With roughly 3,500 educators on strike, nearly 43,000 students are shut out of school.
“I feel energized,” art teacher Kelly Merrill said as he stood in front of César Chávez K-8 School with his second grade daughter. “I am frustrated that it doesn’t seem like the district is listening to what our needs are.”
Merrill said more planning time is a high priority. He has to get to school early to prepare for back-to-back classes that range from kindergartners to seventh graders, he said. And as a parent, he wants smaller class sizes for his daughter, he said.
How long the strike might last is unknown, though sources have pegged the likely duration as three days to two weeks — a long time for students and families, particularly those without access to technology for online instruction or child care for young children whose parents can’t work from home. Teachers will forgo pay every day that they strike.
There is a yawning gap of at least $200 million between what teachers are seeking and what the district says it can afford without having to make deep and painful cuts in the years ahead, whether through layoffs, fewer instructional days, closed schools or a combination of the three.
Revi Shohet, a special education teacher at Bridger Creative Science School in Southeast Portland, said that since school buildings reopened full-time after 18 months of pandemic closures, their students had experienced trauma and returned with heightened anxieties, needing more support from adults.
“Portland is a very expensive city to live in, so the cost of living is an issue, but what we’re really fighting for is better conditions for our students and our teachers,” Shohet said.
Amy Estep, a clinical social worker who has worked at the Pioneer Special School Program for 20 years, echoed Shohet’s thoughts, saying, “I think there’s been a lack of funding for education for a long time, so I think what we’re feeling on the floor and in classrooms is a lack of making education a priority. I think coming out of COVID, kids are definitely more emotionally dysregulated ... Students are having a hard time learning and staff need support.”
And, Estep added, “Teachers, we deserve to have a life where we can go out to eat or we can go on vacation. It’s just not a living wage in Portland. I went to the grocery store on Sunday and had $7 in my checking account. It’s rent, utilities, I have kids in college. I feel as a professional I deserve to have a little better financial stability.”
LaQuisha Minnieweather, the parent of three students at César Chávez, brought bagels, breakfast sandwiches and hot food for picketing teachers. “If this is what it takes for the teachers to be heard, then that’s what it takes for the kids to be heard,” she said about the strike.
The school enrolls a high share of students learning English as their second language and a very high proportion of students navigating poverty. Largely as a result, it had a median class size of 20 students last year, smaller than all but 16 other district schools. But its middle school science classes averaged 28 students.
Minnieweather said she wants teachers to get a living wage. She volunteers in classrooms and has seen how overwhelmed educators can get with large classes, she said. “Because they’re not getting the support they need through PPS, parents are stepping in and trying to help,” she said.
Kathy Paxton-Williams, who teaches English language learners at Kelly Elementary School, said the school has one of the highest concentrations of students who do not speak English as a first language. Her students come from Russia, Ukraine, Central America, Mexico, China and Vietnam, she said. Paxton-Williams said she stays at school every night until 6 or 7 p.m, just to get through the grading and lesson planning she needs to do to help her students with complicated learning and emotional needs, though her paid workday ends at 3:30 p.m.
“I want to do my job well and serve the kids well,” she said. “There is just not enough time.”
Her colleague, fifth grade teacher Miles Hartfelder, is in his second year of teaching at Kelly. His students were feeling a mixture of nervousness, uncertainty and excitement about being out of school for an unspecified amount of time, he said.
As a newer teacher with less seniority, Hartfelder acknowledged that he could be vulnerable if the district had to make cuts to its budget as a result of negotiations. But he said he was buoyed by a wave of support from parents, felt valued by his building administrators and was confident in the union’s position that the district can find the money to pay teachers more.
By 12:30, hundreds of teachers from all over the district had converged at Roosevelt High School to hear National Education Association President Becky Pringle and United Teachers of Los Angeles President Cecily Myart-Cruz address the crowd. The school’s front lawn was a sea of blue shirts and picket signs with children running around the edges.
A group of children plays basketball in the street in SE Portland the morning of Wed., Nov. 1, 2023. School was cancelled for the day as a Portland Public Schools teachers’ strike began.Dave Killen / The Oregonian
Around the corner from the rally, Analicia Lopez, the high school’s cafeteria lead, was manning a grab-and-go station, offering baggies full of mozzarella sticks, marinara sauce, carrots, cheese, chocolate milk and chips for free to anyone between the ages of 1 and 18. So far, she’d only had 9 students come by, she said, but if the strike drags on, Lopez said traffic would pick up considerably, just as it did during COVID closures.
Her own four children — two boys at Roosevelt and two girls at nearby Sitton Elementary — were at home with her mother, Lopez said. They’ll be expected to do household chores and brought Chromebooks with them to keep up with their learning on their own, she said.
“The issue with where I live is that there are problems with shootings in the neighborhood, you know,” she said. “So I’m a little worried, to have the kids in the house all day.”
Merrill, the César Chávez art teacher, said he is “not too concerned” about his daughter being out of school for a few days. But he said, after a week, it would be “hard (for her) to get back. It’s almost like starting the year over.”
Nearby, at the Pier Park apartment complex off North Columbia Boulevard, small groups of kids were clustered on porches, trying to stay out of the rain. Three girls, two from Sitton and one from Cesar Chavez K-8, said they were trying to use their school-issued Chromebooks to play math games. They’d rather be in school, they said, because they felt sad for their teachers who were out on strike.
Across the apartment complex’s parking lot, a group of boys from George Middle School who were riding bikes through puddles said they didn’t expect to do any academic work during the strike and were happy to have time off of school.
Anna Metnick, the mother of two children at Sitton Elementary, said her second grader spent the day at work with her husband at a local food company while her fourth grader stayed in her office while she was on Zoom calls. Metnick said she supports teachers and hopes to be able to join them on the picket line, but that it was also difficult to navigate both work and childcare.
“It’s really feeling like COVID vibes,” Metnick said. “Just being at home with the kids again, feeling the uncertainty of what’s going to happen.” Like other district parents, she got a call at noon informing her that school was canceled for the rest of the week. “It feels like a really bad sign honestly that negotiations aren’t moving forward,” she said.
The two sides will not meet again to negotiate until Friday. Friday was already a day off for students and had been scheduled as a teacher professional development day.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday morning, Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero said the district plans to try to reduce administrative positions and contracted services and pare central office spending to essentials. But he also said cuts to the central office alone would not be enough to fund the cost of living adjustments, across-the-board smaller class sizes and extra planning time that the union is seeking.
District officials say an estimated 85 to 90% of the district’s budget is spent on its employees, so there are few other places to go to come up with enough money to award far bigger raises.
The Oregonian/OregonLive asked an independent expert, Laura Anderson, associate director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, to review the district’s budget. Anderson agreed with PAT’s contention that the district has added administrative staff at a faster pace than classroom teachers over the last few years, suggesting that there are savings to be found there.
But her back-of-the-envelope math was that meeting the union’s demands would require cutting the equivalent of 288 teachers from somewhere in the budget. “Is there enough room in here to save all of the 288 jobs — are there enough other categories you could cut from to make up that money? Not really,” she said.
With schools closed, the district is offering free grab-and-go meals on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. The meals, available for anyone ages 1 to 18, are being distributed from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at about half the district’s schools.
Other school districts around the state, including Salem and Medford, are also close to an impasse with their own teachers unions.
Gov. Tina Kotek urged the Portland Association of Teachers this week to stay at the bargaining table, rather than strike. She expressed skepticism that the district could meet all the demands from its union without going into deficit spending.
“Going out on strike is not in the best interest of students or families,” the governor, a big supporter of labor unions, said Monday.
Politics editor Jamie Goldberg contributed to this report.
— Julia Silverman, @jrlsilverman, jsilverman@oregonian.com
— Sami Edge, sedge@oregonian.com, (503) 260-3430
Listen to the Beat Check with The Oregonian podcast episode released October 25, 2023, where education reporter Julia Silverman and City Hall reporter Shane Dixon Kavanaugh answer reader questions about the teacher strike:
-- Julia Silverman; jsilverman@oregonian.com
-- Sami Edge; sedge@oregonian.com