Educators at Capitol Hill’s Meany Middle School rallied earlier this week (Image: Seattle Education Association)
UPDATE 9/6/2022 12:35 PM: The union representing Seattle’s public school teachers and educators have voted to approve a strike. The Seattle Education Association announced a landslide approval of the measure Tuesday following its board recommending the approval last week. The SEA says 75% of its membership cast a vote — 95% of those voted to approve the authorization. The approval sets the stage for union leaders to launch a strike if no deal can be hammered out before Wednesday’s planned first day of school.
UPDATE 9/6/2022 8:45 AM: The district says a delay in the start of school is “likely” as both sides in the labor tussle say weekend talks were not productive as the results of an authorization vote will be officially announced later today.
“We’re fired up and ready to go! SEA members made 6,000 picket signs and trained picket captains to prepare for a possible strike,” a statement posted to social media by the Seattle Education Association reads. “We don’t want to strike but SPS needs to come to an agreement that meets our student needs NOW.”
Meanwhile, the district was blunt in an email to student families sent Sunday night. The subject line? “Delay for the start of school is likely.”
Original report 9/2/2022: Members of the Seattle Education Association are voting this Labor Day weekend on authorization that would OK a strike if its negotiators can’t bang out a deal with the district before Wednesday’s planned first day of school.
“None of us want to strike. But we have a choice,” SEA union president Jennifer Matter said in a statement. “We can go back to school the way things were before, with a lack of student supports and widespread educator burnout, or we can fight and unite for something better.”
The results of the authorization vote aren’t expected until Tuesday as the union and the district say talks continue. CHS reported here on the issues around pay, special education, and the pandemic at the core of the contract talks.
Meany Middle School is the ♥ of our community! #SEAstrong ✊🏽✊🏾✊🏿 pic.twitter.com/F1pr8wMMpC
— SeattleEdAssoc (@SeattleEdAssoc) August 31, 2022
Recent deals including a one-year agreement reached to narrowly avert a strike in 2018 included significant pay raises and increased family leave.
More recently, the union and the district butted heads before the start of the school year in 2021 over COVID-19 protocol and policies.
The district is now led by Superintendent Dr. Brent Jones who stepped up from his interim post earlier this year.
PLEASE HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE!
Subscribe to CHS to help us pay writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for as little as $5 a month.
Is this about student support or is this about salary? 40% of the district is paid over $100k.
https://fiscal.wa.gov/DVK12Salaries.aspx
Both.
We need teachers to be highly paid and we need better learning environments for kids if we want any hope to stay relevant as a country.
$100k is barely enough to live in the same city they teach in.
$98k is the median household income in Seattle. That means half of households earn less than those high paid teachers, many of whom will be living with partners who also work…
There’s just over 3,400 teachers, meaning less than 1,000 make over $100k. That’s a tiny amount compared to the total population of Seattle.
To make $100k, they’ve been working in the district for awhile, so we want to encourage them to stay.
$100K is not a lot in Seattle.
It is disingenuous to compare an annual salary number for teachers to annual salaries for other professions because seattle teachers only work about 8 months a year (summer break is half of June plus all of July and Aug, winter break is 2 weeks long, spring break is 1 week, and then SPS has a “mid-winter break” that is just another made up way for teachers to get paid for not working.) So just considering breaks in the school calendar that are at least one week long you have already removed 3 1/2 months of work. Then there are other breaks around 3 day weekends, “in service” days, early releases etc. Add it all up and a teacher making $100K for 8 months of work is actually making the equivalent of $151K if they actually worked worked a full year. I know this doesn’t comport with what you have been told for years or your socialist pro union proclivities, but as the father of 2 kids in SPS, the fact of the matter is seattle teachers are overpaid and underperforming.
SPS has many many many issues, but teacher pay just isn’t one of them and frankly the union and high teacher salaries are actually a huge contributor to the problems the district faces. Because of the power of the union, the existing teachers suck up every last dollar that gets allocated to the schools by the state by raising pay for existing teachers (through repeated use of strikes) leaving the district unable to hire new teachers and reduce class size or hire non union essential staff like nurses, psychologists, etc. (no elementary schools in SPS have dedicated nurses, they rotate through the schools and are only in a given schools 1-2 days a week. Most other districts have a nurse in every school every day).
Seattle teachers are grossly overpaid and anyone who tells you different is either uniformed or part of the pro-socialist, pro-union government grift.
You either must be from a state that treats their teachers like absolute trash.
To say teachers only work 8 months a year is horribly disingenuous when the school calendar is nearly 10 months long (teachers are back at school a few weeks before and one after school starts and ends). Sure there are a few breaks in there, but teachers spend that time grading papers and catching upon lesson plans they barely have time to during normal school hours. If they are lucky, they might get to grade papers while on vacation.
During their 2 month summer “vacation”? Developing lesson plans for the next school year and pursuing continuing education. And sure, they take a vacation or two, so fault them for that if you’re a psychopath.
If you truly are a Seattle school teacher, go talk to your kid’s teacher some time. Ask them about their workload outside of work. And through all of that, they have cretins like you, yelling and blaming them for everything because they dare to ask for a raise.
But you let us all know by your first sentence that you are what’s wrong with this county.
I just want to second your point from my perspective of someone that is close to several teachers that span several generations and school a few social workers!
I’ve made this point on other articles on CHS, but damn was MLK Jr right when he warned that we need to transition from a thing-oriented society to a people-oriented society. The amount of work and care that most teachers bring to their work (because let’s be honest, they aren’t doing it for the luxurious pay 🙄) is amazing, and the importance of how that translates to the development of our societies youth and overall development is ridiculously undervalued. Anyone who looks down on the work that they or their community relies upon should either put their skin in the game or sit back and let others do the hard work of raising the next generation.
My children attend the highly acclaimed Garfield High School. US News and World Report ranks Garfield as 13th best in Washington State, besting Woodinville, Redmond, and many other Eastside high schools. I want my kids’ teachers to be highly compensated and I’m willing to pay for it.
Care to tell me specifically how much of your income you are willing to pay? $10K a year? $20K? $50K? 100K? $200K?
How much should the hundreds of thousands of people that work or live in this city and make less than teachers, for a full 12 months of work at that, be required to pay to have the teachers at your “highly rated” school paid more?
So much of the pro-labor, pro-union rhetoric lacks even the most basic understanding of economics. It’s all feelings, emotions, and demands that someone else pay more to support your beliefs.
Teachers in seattle are grossly overpaid already, which is what is causing all the other problems they are complaining about (class sizes, counselors, etc). There was a teacher strike in 2015, then in 2018 they voted to strike again but the district was so flush with cash from the McCleary ruling that the district just gave them all the money from the state to shut up and go away, but this act of cowardice in 2018 is what set the stage for all the current issues. The largesse created by the McCleary ruling should have gone to the very things SEA is now demanding, hiring more teachers, reducing class sizes, and hiring non-teaching staff, but instead the existing teachers used union power to suck up all those extra dollars for themselves, leaving our students behind and creating the issues we have today. Unfortunately most people supporting this strike probably haven’t even been in the city long enough to understand any of this history, it’s just blindly supporting “labor” because it’s the trendy thing to do in this city right now.
I’m sorry, and I know it’s not a popular opinion, but teaching isn’t a hard job. Once you’ve done it for a few years your are just recycling the same lesson plans with minor tweaks year after year while you enjoy countless breaks over the course of a 12 month calendar. Most teachers operate very autonomously and don’t have bosses breathing down their necks. They don’t have to work late into the night day after day to deliver multimillion dollar projects on time and on budget, and they don’t have to worry about layoffs in economic downturns, or even being fired for poor performance.
Anyone with a 4 year degree should be able to become a certified teacher after taking a six week course to learn lesson planning, school operations/process, etc. The union artificially restricts the potential supply of teachers through unnecessary requirements which allows them to capture higher salaries than the actual skills required to do the job would warrant. It all sounds so cool and fun to get out and support labor and “tax the rich” but the dirty little secret is that the rich have accountants and options, and with no state income tax, when property taxes go up to support something like teacher raises, rents go up too, and owning a home becomes more expensive and more out of reach and the costs disproportionately fall on working families.
See, I could easily step in and teach high school level economics tomorrow, but I don’t because I want to make more money so I work in private industry instead of demanding the government confiscate more of other peoples money and give it to me.
I would like to see some sort of data to back up all of your baseless claims…
You’re last paragraph says it all… If teaching was so easy and overpaid then we should have some of the best teachers and it should be a desired job. In reality many are deterred from the profession or burn out because it is hard work, not just physical, but emotional work, that I don’t think you’ve shown the capacity to really understand…
If teaching the future generation isn’t one of the most important jobs in the world, then we have truly lost our priorities 🤦♂️
The other 60%, such as myself who has now taught for nearly ten years, can’t cap 35k. Your point does not stand.
I just looked at the SEA website and starting teachers with just a certificate started at 70k while a teacher who used the ce money available to them starts at 86k. A teacher with 15 years of experience gets paid over 125k, which is more than local RNs and PTs (who have doctoral degrees). You are FOS claiming you make 35k a year. The pay schedule is online.
I have only respect for RNs and PTs, but when did those certifications include a Ph.D? It feels like you aren’t appreciating the degrees required to teach many of highschool subjects or to teach in general. Certainly, RNs and PTs are not treated as well as they should be, but that is no excuse to treat everyone else poorly. Instead, advocate that all these workers need more respect.
PTs have a doctorate level education. It isn’t a PhD same as a MD is not.
Is this the salary schedule? https://www.seattleschools.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Certificated-Non-Supervisory-2021-22.pdf It shows the base teacher salary of $63k and the most senior w/PhD to be $123.5k.
If you are not making $35 k after 10 years it’s time to move on. You can make more than that starting at Dicks. Given the contractual pay increases since 2012 you must have started as a teacher earning $22 to $25 k back in 2012.
After how the union refused, ridiculously, to return to in person school at a time when districts across the country were in school, I have no patience or sympathy whatsoever for the union. They totally burned their bridge with me as one taxpayer. They need to compromise asap and get a contract done this weekend. Why should us parents continue to pick up the slack time and time again for the union’s issue-du-jour liberal dreamd? My kids are real and need education, in school, they shouldn’t be hostages in issue wars.
Agree the SPS failure to return to in-person instruction was deplorable, but it also occurred at Eastside schools. At least Garfield is an excellent high school.
It’s mind boggling to me that people are questioning how much teachers deserve to make, after the last two years? Take whatever you think is too much, then triple it. As a long time educator, and substitute teacher for SPS this past year, witnessing firsthand, schools in every corner of our city, I wish that everyone, especially the ones who can actually afford to own a home in Seattle could spend a day in a classroom, an HOUR, then tell us, how much a teacher is worth.
Another year another strike. The Union and SPS continue to fight like the children they should be serving.
Just remember that this is a bit of a zero sum game insofar as the gains made by teachers comes not at the expense of management, but at the expense of taxpayers.
I’m reading a book about London blitz in WW II. I find myself wondering if the children being bombed and huddling in shelters spent their time feeling traumatized and justified in not performing in school while being bombed from above by German warplanes. I suspect not, as character was a given, not self-pity.
Yet we have a union, the teachers themselves, and district who largely abandoned their jobs during COVID, not requiring attendance, allowing cameras to be turned off, ensuring failure. But the teachers were not allowed to fail students! And let’s not forget the many students, who thumbed their noses at attendance and their work inside and outside the classroom.
Prior articles in the Seattle Times show significant drops in test scores measuring competencies in math and reading from the pandemic, on top of abysmal pre-pandemic scores. I found this sentence among others: “… 24% proficiency rate in math for 11th graders and the 46% rate for fourth graders in reading.”
And we the parents and taxpayers are expected to support and reward a failed system. The initial scores were horrible. And then the approach taken that assumed trauma and basically permitted not teaching and not studying dropped them further.
If the SPS was for profit company, they would be closed down by fleeing customers, and the Board would fire the management and certainly would not entertain raises and praise for those involved.
I blame the system for the decline in scores around COVID and the abysmal parents and communities for the horrible baselines status. Make no mistake, it is about family values. Income and language spoken at home are not excuses. The disparate outcomes of various communities is about values. You have a kid, you take care of that kid. Books are free and everything else involving learning is subsidized or free if one has a need. There is no excuse for not meeting standards. The schools can’t fix this. It starts long before school, in early childhood.
The Seattle district spends an average of $17,000 per student per year. Multiply that by average class size of say 20, and you have 340,000 per year. How much for the teacher and instructional materials? Where does the rest go? Some for the buildings and maintenance, some for needed supervisory staff but seriously? I found another citation that says $18,175 in the 2021-2022 year.
I love teachers in principle. In practice not so easy. Many teachers with their rhetoric and behavior over the past several years have earned more contempt than empathy. If they told their students that they are expected to be in class, do their homework, and come prepared or be failed, what would the Seattle classroom and these scores look like? And of course this would need to start in Kindergarten or preschool and be a consistent message from all involved, not just a heroic teacher trying to fix years of failure and pressure to treat lightly by all around them. I am so over the failing parents and students, the oh so precious teachers who abandoned their jobs and classrooms during COVID, and the race and social justice obsessed system at all levels.
I’m glad you’re over it all, from your position of privilege. Forgive me for thinking that the people that program our kids for the future should be better paid that someone fresh out of college programming an app to bring you takeout 🙄
I get so disheartened whenever I see people, whom I’m assuming are from the private sector, complaining about unions. You do realize that the concept of your cushy benefits and most of the basic ones you rely on weekly were hard fought by union members sacrificing their time, money, and lives to fight corporate and government alliances against workers.
I too have denounced unions as wasteful and outdated in my youth, the product of small town Midwest education. I now know that they continue fight on the behalf of workers… today against wage theft (one of the largest forms of monetary crimes in many areas of the US ), proper workplace protections, and fair scheduling that actually respects workers time. If you read a true account of US history and think that unions were the villains and business/wealth/government were the saviors then I don’t know how to help you 🤷🏻♂️
There are very few things in life easier than declaring “pay the teachers!” or “the children are the future!”
But without details those statements aren’t even worth the paper this blog in printed on.
Crosscut reported the following numbers; 3,700 teachers in Seattle school district with an average annual salary of $89K, these numbers largely comport with those mentioned in other news sources. Simple math then shows that the district, and thus the taxpayers, spent $329M last year on salaries for teachers in Seattle Public Schools. It has also been widely reported that state is kicking in for a 5.5% raise for all teachers across the state next year, while the district is looking to kick in an additional 1% for a total increase of 6.5% next year (with district raises raises of 2% and 2.1% in years 2 and 3. Let’s make the safe assumption that the state COLA raises are also 2% in years 2 and 3 of this contract so totals of 4% in year 2 and 4.1% in year 3). So next year that average teacher salary goes to almost $95K and the annual bill to the taxpayers increases $21M to $350M and by the end of the contract that average salaried teacher is making over $102K per year and the taxpayer bill will be $380M, $60M more than what was paid last year. And that is the contract that has them out of strike!?!?! When your fallback position is a great deal, it’s a bit of a nuclear option to go on strike. If the district was trying to cut salaries or do mass layoff, sure I could see a strike, but when your worst case scenario is making almost $103K (for 8 months worth of work) within 3 years with, great benefits and almost total job security, and when our kids lost almost 2 full years of schooling and the test scores show the true extent of the damage it did to learning, going on strike is overkill, it’s not like teachers are dying from the black lung or something. They should be at work.
But back to the math. Let’s assume the purest intent from these union members, and the teachers are really just fighting for our kids and though it has been widely reported that they find these raises unsatisfactory, we will assume they will settle for these raise amounts if they get smaller class sizes and more special ed teachers, let’s say a 10% increase in HC, so 370 more teachers, and because it is safe to assume that you can’t hire 370 first year teachers next year it is safe to assume these will largely have to be hired away from other districts and so will come with roughly the same distribution of tenure/certificates as the 3700 already on staff, so we can probably keep the average salary of all the (now) 4070 teachers at the $102.6K number we calculated earlier. Thus 4,070 X $102,600 = $417.6M. So now, without even addressing the additional raises they are asking for, we have increased the annual tax payer bill almost $100M in just 3 years, in a very conservative scenario.
So again, how much of that additional $100M in annual cost are you and your family willing to cover? And if your only answer is “tax the rich”, that really isn’t possible in this state, property taxes/levies fund schools and those are uniformly applied so can’t be targeted at just the rich. So how much of that additional $100M will come from rent/COL increase on a housekeeper working in a downtown hotel? What about a daycare worker? What about a gardener or Uber driver?
The long term solution would be to break the union, reduce the barriers to entry to becoming a teacher (4 year degree + 1.5 post grad years is onerous and unnecessary) to drastically increase the pool of potential teachers so that the market rates can accurately match demand with a greater supply, but that will never happen. They should sign the contract in front of them and get back into the classrooms, it’s only a 3 year contract. Take your generous raises, get back into class, get test scores back up, and then come for another bite at the apple in 2026 and bring more than complaints of “fairness”, bring proof that your are worth more with higher test scores, higher graduation rates, and higher % of graduates attending colleges.