“I don’t want to strike, but I will,” was the rallying cry as Southern Arizona educators took to the streets before and after school Wednesday, demanding state lawmakers provide better pay for teachers and more funding for schools.
Well over 1,000 educators and education supporters flooded the Arizona State Office Building in downtown Tucson on Wednesday afternoon, after a spattering of schools around the state held “walk-ins” or short rallies on school grounds before walking into campus for a normal school day.
Educators and organizers say they’re testing the waters and public support for a strike.
“I think (a walkout) is an inevitability unless something very drastic happens,” said Derek Harris, a teacher at Dietz K-8 school in the Tucson Unified School District and an organizer with Arizona Educators United.
With police escorts in tow, hundreds of teachers marched from nearby schools blocking off roads and creating several streams of red that converged on the state building downtown. Others drove in from schools in Marana, Vail and Sahuarita.
Arizona Educators United, the grassroots group organizing the rallies, is demanding a 20 percent raise in teacher pay statewide, which would bring Arizona teacher salaries near the national average. That would cost the state about $640 million per year. They’ve also called for lawmakers to restore total education funding to pre-recession levels and pledge to not enact any more tax cuts until that happens.
Gov. Doug Ducey and Republican lawmakers quickly shot down those demands, saying the state is doing all it can to restore education funding without raising taxes. Ducey ran for governor in 2014 on a pledge of cutting taxes every year, and has so far kept that pledge.
Ducey and Republican lawmakers have committed to a 1 percent raise on top of the 1 percent bonus they offered last year.
The governor’s $10.1 billion budget proposal for fiscal year 2019 calls for an additional $190 million in discretionary K-12 spending, including an additional $100 million in capital funding known as District and Charter Additional Assistance, which district and charter schools can use to cover items ranging from textbooks to school buses, with a promise to increase that fund over the next five years.
In his first year in office, Ducey cut District and Charter Additional Assistance by $116 million.
Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate are meeting in small groups behind closed doors this week to negotiate their budget priorities. Budget documents circling the Capitol show House Republicans still haven’t settled on how much they’re willing to offer for teacher raises.
House Speaker J.D. Mesnard said on Twitter that teachers will get raises.
“There’s no question about it. … The budget will include hundreds of millions of new dollars for schools and teacher pay,” he wrote.
But teachers say that’s not enough. In order to bring Arizona out of the bottom of state rankings for education funding, it will take at least $1 billion per year.
And public pressure has been mounting.
The Red for Ed movement, as it’s become known, started with a handful of teachers wearing red on Wednesdays to protest teacher pay. But in the past month, it’s become much more than that. Bolstered by teacher walkouts that have netted more education funding in West Virginia and Oklahoma, Arizona educators sense an opportunity and have repeatedly massed on the Capitol in recent weeks, demanding more funding for education.
At the Tucson rally Wednesday, protesting teachers were hoping to show strength in numbers and leave an impression on legislators.
Candace Herron, a teacher of 11 years who oversees the special-education department at Wilson K-8 School in the Amphitheater School District, had never been to a protest before.
Her frustration with Arizona’s education system made her feel she had no other choice but to protest for herself and her students. She’s not afraid of going on strike. But she wants to ensure that there’s a critical mass ready to support the movement first.
Herron takes home less than $1,100 per paycheck and earns about $36,000 per year, just $3,000 more than when she started in the district more than a decade ago. A 20 percent increase would allow her to pay all her bills, she said, and be “less stressed out about having to live hand to mouth.”
For her students, more education funding would mean the district could buy desperately needed technology like computers.
“My kids need technology. We’re supposed to be educating the future, and we don’t even have computers for the kids. … We couldn’t even take the AzMERIT test this week on the computer because we don’t have the technology to do that,” Herron said.
Herron spends somewhere between $700 to $1,000 per year on supplies, including pencils, paper and food for hungry kids. She said she frequently works 50 or 60 hours per week.
If lawmakers don’t make significant increases to education funding, she said she’ll be forced to leave the profession.
“Because of all the cuts, there’s so much more on our plates. And I just can’t keep working like that. Nobody deserves to have to keep working like that. And it affects the kids — we’re burned out. It affects education as a whole,” Herron said.
Lori Hauser, a teacher of 32 years, 29 at TUSD, works with preschoolers at Myers-Ganoung Elementary School. She said even with her master’s degree and experience, she’s taking home about $1,300 per paycheck. She’s hoping to retire next year, partly because of the increased stress of the job due to funding cuts, but she worries that the school won’t be able to find a replacement.
She teaches 32 3- and 4-year-olds, eight of them with special needs, in two groups per day. Hauser said she spends about $500 a year on school supplies like paint, paper, bags and Kleenex. She paid for the paint for her classroom walls.
“Most of the time, we can get pencils from the school. But that’s it,” she said.
Hauser said she didn’t want to strike, but if lawmakers don’t increase education funding significantly, “there will be a lot of soul-searching.”
Marea Jenness, a 10th-grade biology teacher at Tucson High and organizer of the march, said teachers are ready to strike if necessary for their own dignity and for their students, who are being shortchanged in their education.
“My biology textbook is older than my students. It’s an 18-year-old biology book that’s held together with tape,” she said. “We had a sign-language teacher for a year at Tucson High who didn’t know sign language. It’s crazy.”
She said a 20 percent raise would cover her family’s car insurance, which she’s currently paying out of retirement savings.
“I’d pay our car insurance, so that maybe when I retire I won’t have to be a greeter at Walmart,” she said.
Jenness said the strong showing at the march gives her hope that lawmakers will hear teachers and make a significant effort toward meeting their demands.
If not, a teachers strike almost certainly is on the horizon, she said.
“In West Virginia they went on strike for I think nine days, and they got all their demands met. I can do nine days,” she said.
