What have other Public-School Educators accomplished by Unionizing?
By unionizing, educators have won big improvements in working conditions and a greater say in decisions at their schools. Some examples of these improvements include:
- Voice in Decisions that Impact our Classrooms: Many educators have won a greater role in decisions about health and safety, educational programs, class sizes, student support, professional development as well as other issues important to the education profession. Too often district administration or school boards seek to implement new policies that seem disconnected from on-the-ground learning needs. We have seen examples of this during this pandemic when bad decisions have the potential to harm the health of our students, colleagues, and communities.
- Greater Ability to Support Our Students: Union educators have won smaller class sizes, lower caseloads, and increases in prep time. Together such improvements make our work more sustainable over the long term, cut down on turnover, and help us better support our students.
- Improved Salary and Benefits: Public educators have won big increases in salaries, improvements in benefits, and expansions of stipends through unionizing. While few educators chose this profession to get rich, being able to afford raising a family or buying a house while teaching is hard to do if our salaries do not keep up with cost-of-living increases. Sadly, our salaries and benefits in Clovis have not kept up with comparable sized districts with similar student populations.
Ultimately, the decisions for what we want to accomplish at our schools will be up to us. We can learn from the accomplishments of other union educators, but what we seek to improve will be dependent on the goals and values our Clovis colleagues establish and how united we are in our union. Importantly, once we unionize, administration can no longer make changes to our teaching/working conditions without negotiating with us. That means we can protect what we currently love about working in Clovis and work together to make improvements in areas that need change.