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This morning at 9 AM in the biting cold, I joined the teacher and parent picket line outside Angier Elementary School, where I attended from 1996 to 2002, and I was greeted by not fewer than three of my former Angier teachers. And you better believe I was what you would call a Memorable Student, even back then as a tiny, tow-headed child who talked too much in classes ... and organized too many student upheavals each year.
Ms. Rosenthal, my first-grade teacher and a Ward 5 resident herself, reminisced with me this morning about my childhood ability to survey my surroundings, clock what everyone was up to and what their deal was, and then figure out how to articulate very descriptively and perceptively what was going on. I’ve often been told I still do that.
“Competitive contracts”
When I was a kid growing up in the Newton Public Schools, our community defined a “competitive contract” as the top tier of the competition. We weren’t shooting for the middle of the middle and calling it a day. We were paying top dollar to get top talent and the academic results often spoke for themselves. “Good enough” was not in our vocabulary.
Today, far fewer Newton educators (and almost none of the rising, young talent) can afford to live in the community they serve. We entrust them to help raise, protect, and guide the children of our community, yet our leadership now aims for average when it comes to compensation. (And then badger them for using the family leave benefits they were promised in exchange for reduced salaries, because our leaders don’t want to pay for the necessary level of substitutes and we don’t sympathize with the humanity of people having family emergencies that require extended leave.)
A brighter vision from the people on the front lines
Remarkably, however, the members of the Newton Teachers Association have actually focused most of their demands in this strike on things beyond compensation. They’re putting forth, as they have for a couple years now, a complete vision of a better school system. I’m not even talking about their requests for additional planning time and ways to support students academically, which are all eminently sensible.
Our teachers are witnessing a state of emergency every day inside the schools. They want social workers, mental health crisis specialists, disability aides, and kindergarten aides in the buildings and in the classrooms to get things back on track after the profound social/emotional/learning crisis of the pandemic. And they want those buildings and classrooms to be safe and well-maintained, not crumbling and moldy with broken bathrooms.
That’s what the children of this community need. Many of these positions (along with some literacy and math interventionists) have been cut or under-staffed in recent years because of the inflexibility of the Mayor’s allocation growth.
The NTA vision of the Newton Public Schools is highly compatible with the vision for righting the ship that the new Superintendent of Schools has laid out, but the NTA members have one crucial caveat: The Newton community also needs to be willing to pay people credibly to do these seriously difficult and specialized jobs, and the teachers shouldn’t have to “chip in” financially on hiring essential personnel by accepting a contract that is detached from the economic reality of living in the Boston area in the year 2024. That makes sense to me.
What’s fair?
I’ve been asked what a fair contract means to me, but I would turn that around and ask what amount of money you would have to be paid to do these jobs. Imagine you are a new job-seeker, loaded up with student debt, not yet married, burdened by rent and a lengthy commute (which might make it hard to get to that third job you’ve picked up). And worst of all, there’s a pretty good chance the district will lay you off in a couple more years as part of a burn-and-churn strategy to hire an even younger aide, which means you can’t really make long-term life plans.
If the number $26,000 is not sounding realistic to you, then perhaps you can understand why someone might vote to strike – regardless of potential legal fines – and perhaps you can understand why their colleagues are also saying “enough is enough.”
No one teacher alone can do everything their students need, and that means they need more aides and support staff. All of them need to be paid a real amount of money, especially after the past five years of changes in the economy.
And that means a bigger allocation overall is needed from Mayor Fuller. Just about everyone in office in Newton knows this and understands this. I can’t possibly speculate on why they won’t say so publicly now, but it has been acknowledged openly in every private conversation I have been part of for nearly a year now…
Everyone in this city also knows that it’s not enough to say NPS is the biggest department with the most employees, if the money does not cover what we need done. And they know that saying you have “funded the schools” by listing off every mandatory capital investment remotely schools-related, including the ones voters made happen, when people are obviously referring to annual operations is a farcical deflection more worthy of an Abbott and Costello routine.
Break the austerity mindset
I know the taxes can be difficult in this city as it is – that’s why as a City Councilor I have championed tax relief for low-income households, especially seniors – but even without further tax increases we have other options available to the city financially to provide the necessary NPS funding levels to rebuild our school system and public confidence.
We have wiggle room here and there. We can make different choices on how we provide certain services. We could reassess our growth in non-services set-asides each year. Plus, maybe if we actually fixed our floundering core public services, voters might be a bit more open to tax increases after all.
I’m no profligate spender, especially after four years on the Council’s Finance Committee, getting the inside scoop. I’m all for fiscal responsibility, because that’s how you stretch a dollar further, but that’s not the same thing as imposing arbitrary “fiscal discipline” percentages on the backs of schoolchildren. Find somewhere else to rein in out-of-control growth in appropriations. Putting the austerity squeeze on our kids is reaching a level of abstraction from humanity that I have rarely seen in my life. If anything is “unsustainable,” it is how we are treating our schoolchildren’s unmet needs, not how much we are paying the heroic people who serve them daily.
Who this is all for
We’re a municipal government – we’re supposed to serve the people first. The educators of the Newton Teachers Association remember that. But they’re also human beings, not robots. We should pay them to stay and keep rebuilding the Newton Public Schools for our kids, instead of trying to burn through them like they’re infinitely replaceable and interchangeable. I know I couldn’t have replaced my own Newton teachers growing up and gotten the same results.
See you at the next rally or picket line. I’ll be standing with the NTA – because it doesn’t have to be this way.
If you are interested in donating to support the NTA strike fund, that link is here.