To paraphrase Mark Antony, I come to praise the Kentucky Education Association, not to bury it. Even though I am a founder of what some may wrongly see as a rival organization, Kentucky Educators United, I still love my union — because there’s more than one way to advocate.
I’m a member in long standing of the Jefferson County Teachers Association — since I was a student teacher — and, therefore, a member of KEA since 2007 or 2008. I’m a building rep at my school and have been for years. In fact, former colleagues now at other schools often call me to ask me JCTA questions. Still!
My father was a Teamster, and my brother was a member of the National Association of Letter Carriers (Support the Post Office!) until he retired in January. Before I became a teacher, I was the assistant shop steward of the Wire Service Guild at The Associated Press’s Louisville Bureau. When I worked for non-profit organizations, I was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. (An injury to one is an injury to all!)
In other words, I’m union all the way.
But in these turbulent times, educators need more.
I was one of the founders of JCPS Leads, a grassroots group of parents, community members, but mostly teachers, who helped organize the six-day “sickout” to protest the SBDM-weakening HB 250 and helped to forestall proposed pension deform and backdoor voucher bills. (SBDM stands for Site-Based Decision Making, a school-based council that still remains powerful in the other 169 districts.) The bottom-up nature of the organizing meant that JCPS Leads members could be agile and inventive. We could advocate for actions that might have led to legal trouble for JCTA or KEA. (You’re welcome, guys!) And we still can.
I was invited last December to a meeting of teacher activists from around the nation. The convener was Rebecca Garelli, one of the heroic leaders of the 2018 Arizona teachers’ strike. I spoke with her for this article.
“NEU (National Educators United) was founded for two simple purposes,” Garelli told me. “One main reason NEU was founded was to unite teachers across the nation and build a space for educators to share in the work of discussing organizing strategies, building organizing tools, and helping to grow our own statewide educators groups.
“The second main reason is to support educators in states without a statewide educator group as they build their own grassroots educator network. NEU goals are simple: uniting the educator ‘united’ groups across the nation and discuss strategies, discuss our struggles, and develop organizing tools that can be brought back to our educator united groups that have already been established. By sharing the work, developing tools collectively, we can better understand our collective struggles, recognize how they differ, and continue to grow the movement.”
Garelli, a veteran of the 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike, knew that she needed a grassroots strategy for Arizona, a “Right-to-Work” state where only one-third of the state’s educators are in a union. So they organized statewide through Facebook, created Arizona Educators United, and walked out for eight days.
“AEU was founded initially to open a space for educators to join in collective action and demand an increase in education funding,” Garelli explained. “AEU has evolved greatly over the past 2.5 years and continues to serve a vital role in the educator organizing movement through educating, agitating, organizing, and developing tools that can help locals organize.”
The result? The teachers got a raise of nearly 20%, and Arizona agreed to hire more counselors for schools. Impressed with the results, more people joined the union. A win-win for everyone involved!
Garelli also realized that teachers across the country shared the same concerns: fighting charter schools and vouchers in one guise or another, budget cuts, and inequitable school spending. Teachers also face water-downed professional standards, lucrative high-stakes tests, and the unfair treatment of black and brown kids. Nationwide threats needed a nationwide response. So that’s how the NEU spin-off, Kentucky Educators United, was born.
There’s plenty of work to do, plenty to go around. We’ve been organizing so-called “Motor Marches” (long parades of cars decorated with slogans in washable paint that drive around to protest unsafe in-person reopenings). We’ve been to sites in Indiana, as well as Kentucky. We have helped to mobilize parents and teachers locally, while bringing in sympathetic folks from across the state to help bring attention. We believe that our interventions have made a difference in persuading recalcitrant school boards of the riskiness of in-person schools.
Grassroots activism has proved a godsend for police reform, the #MeToo movement, voting access, the environment, police-free schools, immigrants, and civil rights for ethnic minorities, women, and LGBTQ folks. No reason that it won’t be a boon to our unions, too.
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