Public employees crowd in line as they wait to enter the Capitol on February 22. Photo by Jake Jarvis.
BY: TAYLOR BENNETT, POLICY COORDINATOR, THE HUB
Since the last time we brought you the Legislative Hubbub, public outcry on behalf of West Virginia’s teachers has escalated. Folks are making noise, but there is so much more to it than that.
We’ve talked before about the power of “my opinion” becoming “our opinion.” We’re currently seeing that concept in historic action. This week I waited in line for over an hour with a woman and her daughter, both of whom are teachers in Logan County. As we waited in the rain to get into the Capitol, she told her mother had also been a teacher and had participated in the 1990 strike. Now three generations of their family have taken the fight for better pay and adequate benefits to the Capitol.
Teachers, schools, and the education system as a whole have long been pillars of WV communities. School systems are often the largest employer in a county; teachers educate our future workforce and help ensure that parents are able to participate in the workforce now; schools become the central location for community activity; they even provide food and healthcare to students who aren’t able to get those things elsewhere.
Here at The Hub, our work focuses on bringing folks together to build stronger communities from the ground up, but strong communities are difficult to build when there is a pillar crumbling.
Though a teachers’ strike might present some logistical concerns for families across the state, it’s important to note that teachers are taking action not on an isolated challenge, but on a broken system that they’ve been living with for decades. The women I met, and everyone standing with them are part of an ever-growing group people who are fighting to fix a system that’s in shambles after nearly 80 years of neglect.
As legislators struggle to come to agreement on what ought to be done about the teachers’ strike, the focus has often been on short-sighted fixes, with Legislative leadership sticking to the story of not having enough funding to go around.
It’s important to mention that while these suggested fixes are being discussed, legislators could and definitely ought to explore systemic, long-term solutions to the foundational problems which have been escalating for so many years. So far, this type of solution hasn’t been discussed publicly.
Additionally, while the system is set up to offer opportunities for legislators to work these fixes, they are merely opportunities. Some might be well-suited to meet teachers’ needs, some are band-aid style patch ups that don’t address the causes of an issue. And above all, these opportunities accomplish nothing unless legislators decide to act on them.
West Virginia’s challenges deserve far more than the band-aid type fixes that will only serve to pass the buck on to the next Session. If legislators can’t work together to begin to address the systems level challenges that teachers are striking about, this pillar of our communities will continue to erode and our goal of creating stronger, more vibrant communities will be even further away.
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Your quote “fighting to fix a system that`s in shambles after nearly 80 years of neglect” has been and continues to be the cloak passed down ‘ per your time line, since 1938, or so. Maybe even longer according to my history of education. Let us, however, look at some attempts to `fix` the system. First, the election of the state superintendent was abolished. W. W Trent comes to my mind. First fix- remove the people from the decision making process. Fix number two, let the Governor appoint the State Board of Education. Fix number three, let the State Board `appoint` the State Superintendent. Fix number four, empower these appointed people to entrench their position with the help of legislators (the constitutionally entity responsible for a “thorough and efficient” education in WV) and with more than 787 pages of statutes and 4,749 pages of school board policies. Fix five, when finally taken to the court system to `fix` the inequalities ( see Pauley vs. Board of Education) pass another law, § 18-2E-5, which imbues the state board with even more power. Fix number six, now, with more power, say to the system left in shambles at the local level, we hold you accountable for the `fix` your system is in and if you don`t— we will intervene, strip your elected board of all power, and fix number six, consolidate your community schools, save billions of dollars and this will cure our ills. Fix number seven, since nothing has `fixed` the system so far, let us now acquire some very costly programs(ask the teachers and SSP) that will fix the needs of all students in all fifty-five counties. Fix number eight. Well, I will stop and say, maybe this fix has been placed into the hands of the teachers and supporters who are saying “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.”