SNEA Recommends Fredrick, Heffington for School Board

A committee made up of Springfield NEA members from across the district interviewed four school board candidates today. Tom Prater, Denise Fredrick, Carl Herd and Mark Heffington participated in the interview and discussion sessions.

The committee recommended former SPS teacher and administrator, Denise Fredrick, and business owner, Mark Heffington.

Ray Smith, Springfield NEA President stated, "Denise and Mark would come to the board from completely different perspectives. Each has unique insights, and both see many challenges ahead for Springfield schools and public education in general. Denise and Mark are creative thinkers who possess a sincere interest in bettering our schools."

More later . . . including links to their websites and coverage of the interview process. Ms. Fredrick and Mr. Heffington will attend the SNEA March 17 General Meeting for a question and answer session held at the office, 1525 W. Sunshine, beginning at 4:30. All teachers are welcome.

SNEA Interviews School Board Hopefuls, Notes on Wisconsin

Springfield NEA will conduct interviews with school board candidates tomorrow, Saturday, February 26. A formal recommendation will be posted on this website tomorrow afternoon and will also be distributed to our 900 members as an email link on Monday.

SNEA sent each candidate a questionnaire several weeks ago and invited all the candidates to participate in the process. Candidates responded with their take on such issues as school funding, standardized testing, merit pay, teacher evaluation, tenure, budget priorities (teacher compensation), collective bargaining, tax levy possibilities, and other key issues. The following candidates have responded and will participate:

Tom Prater
Denise Fredrick
Carl Herd
Mark Heffington

SNEA asked for volunteers to serve on the interview committee in January, and the following members responded: Shannon Benne (Watkins), Brent Fullington (Cherokee), Rebecca Jamieson (Hickory Hills), Kittilu Maxson (Wilder), Sara Polk (Portland), Sarah Schofield (Sequiota), Vicky Scott (Cowden/Holland), Jane Sellars (Central) and Ray Smith (SNEA).

Please plan on attending the SNEA General Meeting on March 17 to meet recommended candidates and engage in some meaningful Q & A.

Events in Wisconsin

The story has been on the news for a couple of weeks now, but just in case you missed it . . . newly elected Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, has attempted to rush a bill through his state legislature that would, among other things, gut collective bargaining for public employees. The measure seems especially targeted at teachers, but it also covers state workers. It's interesting that Walker chose to exempt police and fire fighters from the bill. That divide and conquer tactic didn't work, however, as police and fireman have consistently stood with teachers in opposing the bill.

Progress Locally

It's ironic that during all this hubbub in Wisconsin over the past two weeks, that SNEA has twice met with the district to negotiate contracts for teachers, counselors, librarians and school nurses - and the talks were very productive on a number of issues. Based on recent progress, it now seems likely that a first contract will be presented to teachers for ratification within the next couple of months.

Here we are in Springfield taking our first steps in collective bargaining, while in Wisconsin, the first state to allow public sector bargaining, teachers and other public employees are trying to fend off a political attack that would eliminate bargaining altogether. Will the events of Wisconsin affect us in Missouri? There is one distinct difference between the two states in their recognition of collective bargaining. In Wisconsin, there is a longstanding CB law but nothing in their state constitution guaranteeing the right. In Missouri, it's the inverse, there is no law that defines the parameters of bargaining, but there is a provision in the state constitution that guarantees all employees the right to bargain collectively.

This is fundamentally why it took so long to establish CB for teachers in Springfield. Even when the Missouri Supreme Court issued their decision stating that teachers had bargaining rights in 2007, there was (is) still no guiding legislation, so we had to hash it out with the only legislative body that had jurisdiction on the matter, the local school board. The school board finally adopted a CB policy in 2009 and that is, in effect, our bargaining law. In short, it is the definition of local control.

Political Unaccountability

Events in Wisconsin display for all to see what can happen when political ideologues, backed by multi-billionaires with hard-line political goals, gain control of governorships and legislatures. While Governor Walker insists that this is a budget issue - that somehow all the state's budget woes will disappear if only those greedy teachers gave up on bargaining salaries and benefits. In reality, we know that we're in this mess primarily because our federal government waged two wars on credit while Wall Street simultaneously held a decade-long "animal house" of self-investment. And we have politicians telling us that somehow, teacher pensions and salaries are what has brought us to this unhappy place? Think again! Teachers, more than most people, know a bit about accountability, and that particular component is clearly lacking in the above scenario.

Missouri has its own problems with a newly elected legislature that is besieged with delusions of grandeur. They are currently pushing a "Fair Tax" that would throw the state into economic chaos, a "Parent Trigger Act" - one clever observer renamed it the "Rogue Parent Educational Mayhem Act" - which basically allows parents to by-pass the school board and enact their own penalties on individual schools - and, of course, they believe that eliminating teacher tenure will save us all from all those "bad teachers" and make everything just peachy in our schools. The list goes on. It would actually be a marked improvement if they would get back to debating whether or not the crawdad should be the state crustacean.

Missouri NEA and Springfield NEA are watching all these activities very closely. I would encourage all of you to subscribe to MNEA Legislative Updates at www.mnea.org, where you can keep up to date on legislative news from Jefferson City. It does affect us. It will affect us, if we don't pay attention. One can only wonder how many voters in Wisconsin stayed home with a bad case of apathy last November, thinking their vote wouldn't make a difference.

Governor Walker, Welcome to the Show

Here's an excellent blog piece regarding events in Wisconsin written by Howard Schweber, Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Governor Walker, Welcome to the Show

Madison, WI -- In the past two weeks, we have gotten used to hearing the phrase "Day of Rage" applied to cities across the Arab Middle East. Today, it was hard not to draw an analogy between those cities and Madison, WI. Not that anyone resisted the metaphor particularly: Congressman Ryan said, "it's like Cairo has moved to Madison" while protesters carried sign reading "Walker like an Egyptian." 30,000 protesters, that is, who filled all the floors of the Capitol building and the entire city square that surrounds it. Glenn Beck says the Madison protests are part of the same "spread of evil" that has gripped the Middle East. Uh huh.

There were moments of slightly slapstick drama. There are 19 Republican members of the State Senate out of 33 total, one too few for a quorum. All the Democrats fled the state -- they were last heard of in Rockford, Illinois -- but the rumor all day was that one Democrat didn't make it and remains barricaded in his office, protected from the intervention of state police by protesters. In between following events downtown, I taught a class this afternoon: 20 out of 150 students turned up to discuss the First Amendment, and we spent most of the time on the protests. As for the other 130, most of them were at the Capitol.

What drove all of this? Simple: Republican overreach. Since the November elections, Republicans in Congress and in state houses across the country have been declaring themselves the recipients of a popular mandate to do everything from repealing the Affordable Health Care Act to taking drastic steps to cut spending by destroying public sector unions. The problem is that the poll data from the actual election suggests no such thing. Exit polls suggested that actual voters were split roughly evenly: asked to name the highest priority for the new Congress, 37% chose "spending to create jobs"; 40% said "reducing the deficit."

None of which is to suggest that reducing deficits was not a high voter priority, it was just not quite an at-all-costs, cult-like devotion to absolutely anyone who said he could reduce deficits no matter the means.

Enter Scott Walker. Newly-elected GOP governor of Wisconsin with GOP control of both houses, it is understandable that he didn't think he had to ask for permission. But this was way, way over the top, both in terms of procedure and substance.

In terms of procedure, it does not play well to announce a radical bill that will devastate long-standing promises of economic security and then allow only three days for debate before the final vote on ratification. Asked why he did not give the unions even an opportunity to negotiate,Walker's answer joins the litany of the greats along with Richard Daley, Sr., and Huey Long: "To those who say why didn't I negotiate on this? I don't have anything to negotiate with. We don't have anything to give. Like practically every other state in the country, we're broke. And it's time to pay up."

That position was slightly undercut by his insistence that the only alternative would be to lay off 6,000 state workers. It does not quite do to insist that there is nothing about which to negotiate and then to identify a point of negotiation in the very next sentence. All of that, of course, was right before he said that the National Guard is standing by to intervene if public employees try to strike.

In terms of substance, it is hard to know where to begin. Walker's "Repair the Budget" bill is primarily a union-busting measure, many of whose provisions have no fiscal consequences at all. The bill requires public employees to make contributions to pensions and the costs of health care, but union representatives insist that they have no objections to those provisions. They insist that what they care about is the curtailing of collective bargaining rights. But maybe they should read the bill again. Here's a particularly juicy bit:

"Wages would include only total base wages and would exclude any other compensation, including, but not limited to, overtime, premium pay, merit pay, performance pay, supplemental compensation, pay schedules, and automatic pay progressions [emphasis mine]."

In other words, the entire salary grid for teachers would be thrown out, and school districts would be free to define and implement new salary systems from scratch. That's in addition to giving the administration unprecedented authority to redefine Medicaid eligibility (but only downward), and enough other material to fill 144 pages.

Scott Walker thought he could do absolutely anything he wanted to do. He truly thought that his election and the election of Republican majorities in the state Assembly and Senate meant an endorsement of absolutely every impulse, theory, and political vendetta that he felt like expressing. Numerous reports say that Republican legislators were shocked at the level of protest. They had better get used to it -- I don't think these demonstrations are going away. What's going on in Wisconsin, in other words, is what is going on in the country at large. Republicans were elected by promising to focus on creating new jobs and nothing else. Once in office, they focused on pretty much everything and anything other than creating jobs, only to discover that the voters had been listening all along. By 2012 I would not be at all surprised to find Republican candidates for office in Wisconsin trying desperately to deny that they ever heard of Governor Walker, assuming his term lasts that long.

We're not Egyptians, it turns out -- we won't wait 30 years to make our objections known. That was a tough lesson for the Democrats in November, and just three months later it's turning out to be a tough lesson for Republicans as well. What can I say? This is American democracy, the big leagues. Welcome to the show.

Events in Wisconsin and Ohio

We talked about this at our general meeting last night. Teachers are in the news in Wisconsin and other states, as ultra right-wing governors and legislators seek to exploit the economic downturn as a means to strip teachers, nurses, policeman, firefighters and other public employees from basic collective bargaining and workers' rights.

For a link to news comprehenive news links to events in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere, please click the Education Votes link: http://educationvotes.nea.org

Keep up with bills and debates in the Missouri legislature by subscribing the MNEA Legislative Listserv at www.mnea.org. The Legislative Action Center will connect you with email access to your representatives.

While there are no bargaining laws in Missouri regarding public employees, we know that our legislature is currently considering several bills that would undermine public education, local control of school districts and the teaching profession in general. Now, more than ever, it is important that our representatives hear from their consituents regarding some of the ill-conceived, half-baked legislation that they are poised to pass.