On April 23, 2009, all four candidates for Virginia governor participated in a forum at VEA's Delegate Assembly in Hampton. Candidates spoke individually and answered questions from VEA President Kitty Boitnott. Here's what you'll find in the three segments taped and produced by VEA's partner on this effort, WHRO:

Top: Boitnott explains Forum ground rules; Republican nominee Bob McDonnell states his positions and answers questions from Boitnott.
Middle: Democratic hopefuls Brian Moran, Creigh Deeds, and Terry McAuliffe make opening statements and answer questions from Boitnott.
Bottom: Moran, Deeds, and McAuliffe answer questions and make closing statements.

On April 23, 2009, all four candidates for Virginia governor participated in a forum at VEA's Delegate Assembly in Hampton. Candidates spoke individually and answered questions from VEA President Kitty Boitnott. Here's what you'll find in the three segments pasted to the right of your screen:

Top: Boitnott explains Forum ground rules; Republican nominee Bob McDonnell states his positions and answers questions from Boitnott.
Middle: Democratic hopefuls Brian Moran, Creigh Deeds, and Terry McAuliffe make opening statements and answer questions from Boitnott.
Bottom: Moran, Deeds, and McAuliffe answer questions and make closing statements.

On April 23, 2009, all four candidates for Virginia governor participated in a forum at VEA's Delegate Assembly in Hampton. Candidates spoke individually and answered questions from VEA President Kitty Boitnott. Here's what you'll find in the three segments pasted to the right of your screen:

Top: Boitnott explains Forum ground rules; Republican nominee Bob McDonnell states his positions and answers questions from Boitnott.
Middle: Democratic hopefuls Brian Moran, Creigh Deeds, and Terry McAuliffe make opening statements and answer questions from Boitnott.
Bottom: Moran, Deeds, and McAuliffe answer questions and make closing statements

Let's see if this works. Check below

Let's see if this works. Check below

Congested roads in Stafford make for cranky drivers, so honking and blaring horns on Route 1 usually signal tired motorists impatient to get home.

On Tuesday, however, the rush-hour noise on Route 1 was all about support for Stafford Education Association members, who braved the rain and lined up along Route 1, outside the county courthouse, urging drivers to honk for increasing school funding. Blaring horns echoed down the road as teachers, support personnel, students, parents—even a baby—bore signs and tee shirts reading "Fund Our Future,” “ Honk If You Support Schools,” and “Restore Our Value.”

(Click here to view a slideshow of photos from the rally.)

It was the latest evidence that SEA members will not go away quietly as the county’s Board of Supervisors continued to slash school funding. In the latest budget cycle, county supervisors took up the school board’s request for an additional $15 million in school funding required to deal with growth and stepped-up demands—and slashed all but $750,000 of it.

As a result, employees will not get a true COLA this year (small stipends are being given). Step increases for newer employees will be miniscule, and teachers at the top of the scale will get only a $700 stipend.

Teachers like Lou Wendling, who’ve endured three consecutive years when the county board made such significant cuts, say they’ve had enough.

“Two years ago, we started losing positions, and the class sizes started increasing,” said Wendling, who chairs the math department at Brooke Point High School. “With the cuts they’re making in funding, we’re going backwards. The teachers in Stafford are physically and mentally exhausted.”

SEA President Jannette Martin is currently teaching special education classes at Rockhill Elementary School—but that will change next year, as her position will not be funded at that school. Instead, she’ll have to split time at two other campuses. Stafford leaders are compromising on school quality, she said.

“We’ve seen class sizes rise, teachers are doing more with less, they’re working longer hours, staff turnover is 10 percent, and morale has gone down,” said Martin. “We need to shine a light on what is going on, and put the focus back on education.”

Since May 19, as part of the SEA’s “Restore Our Value” campaign, Stafford teachers have been “working to the rule.” They’ve done everything they can to compress their duties within the required 7.5-hour work day. But they’re reclaiming all the extra unpaid time they worked to keep up with committee meetings, grading at home, serving as chaperones, and so on. At many campuses, members enter and leave the buildings together in a show of unity. Many SEA members also are taking leave to spend shifts maintaining a campaign presence at the county administrative office building.

At Tuesday evening’s board meeting, teachers like Jeff Cooper, a government teacher at Stafford High School and a Stafford schools graduate himself, were blunt in telling Supervisors how educators felt about their budget-cutting and the signal it sent. “I have two job interviews with different counties in this area,” said Cooper. “The only reason I would leave Stafford is this board’s lack of respect for educators and this board’s refusal to provide the basic funding needed to support quality education driven by quality teachers.”

Carol Huebner, a middle school math teacher and SEA treasurer, said she and other teachers were not about to quit the fight for better funding—or for the respect they deserve. “We need the administration, the supervisors, the school board, the children, and the parents to respect what we do,” she said. Faced with increasing demands (her class load has jumped from 103 to 148 students in the past three years), “we’ve always just done it,” said Huebner. “This is long-term; we’re going to stick with it.”

For more about Stafford’s work to the rule campaign, go to:
http://seaweteach.org/

To view photos from Tuesday’s SEA rally, go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/veacomm/sets/72157605425729438/

For William Ricks a world history teacher in Sussex County, the seeds of Election Day 2007 were sown many months earlier when the local school board stymied the Sussex Education Association’s (SEA) effort to guarantee a living wage for support professionals. Backed by many in the community, SEA decided a change at the top was in order, so it created the SEA-PAC, chaired by Ricks, and became involved in school board elections for the first time.

On Election Day those seeds bore fruit, as all five candidates cultivated and endorsed by the SEA-PAC swept out the incumbents.

By the next day, when all the results had come in, the mood among SEA teachers and support professionals was “jubilation,” says Ricks. “When it came down to it, we had to fight—so we fought.”

Sussex produced perhaps the most dramatic proof, but across the Commonwealth signs abounded that VEA members helped send the best-qualified supporters of public education into office. Overall, VEA-PAC made recommendations in 78 races for the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates, and supported candidates won in 64 of them—a winning percentage of 82 percent. Local Association PACs also made scores of recommendations in school board elections, and Association members across the state volunteered for candidates.

“It’s obvious that our members got out and made a difference in the races,” said VEA President Princess Moss, who chairs the VEA-PAC. “They got involved, and involvement makes a difference.”

Statewide, the biggest development was the Democratic takeover of the Senate for the first time in 12 years. As a result, Sen. Edd Houck (D) will become chair of the Senate Education and Health Committee and Sen. Chuck Colgan (D) is expected to be named chair of the Senate Finance Committee. The import of the leadership switch: both men have a history of supporting public education and working constructively with VEA. Houck, in fact, earned the prestigious VEA “Friend of Education” award earlier this year.

When they report to Richmond in January for the new session of the General Assembly, lawmakers will have their work cut out for them. Legislators’ decisions on the new biennial state budget (in the face of a revenue shortfall) will play a big part in whether you can expect adequate resources in your classroom and a decent pay raise over the next two years.

In school board races across the Commonwealth, many Local Associations worked for months to help find and elect suitable candidates.

The Bedford County Education Association (BCEA) was one of them. BCEA polled candidates on the issues and eventually recommended Julie Bennington. BCEA members volunteered to hand out literature, going door-to-door, wrote letters to the local paper, and worked at the polls on Election Day, reported BCEA President Fred Glover.

And it paid off, as Bennington prevailed on Election Day. “Due to our members’ hard work, we were able to put a friend of education in office while keeping out those who would gut our public school system,” said Glover.

The Fauquier Education Association (FEA) threw its support to candidates backed by the Fauquier Alliance for Better Schools, a parent group working for full funding of a responsible school budget. (An anti-tax group put forth an opposition slate.)
FEA mailed twice to every Association member in the county playing up the importance of the races and supporting the recommended candidates. Two out of three won, giving FEA a supportive majority on the five-person school board.

And in District 3, work by local Associations in Grayson, Floyd, Montgomery, Mercer, and Carroll paid off with many recommended candidates winning election to school boards or board of supervisors posts. The victory in Floyd placed a retired VEA member on the Board of Supervisors.

In Sussex, the SEA had never formed a political action committee to support qualified school board candidates. But that changed when the local Association’s nationally recognized living wage campaign ran into board resistance. Spearheaded by bus driver and teacher aide Jerry Parham, and assisted by the VEA and NEA, Sussex ESPs had prepared a well-researched plan for improving wages of support professionals, some of whom had toiled for decades in the county’s school system and still received near-poverty wages. But the school board blocked the plan.

Ricks, who was president of SEA when Parham approach him about starting a living wage campaign, says the Association’s approach to the school board elections used some of the same tactics as the living wage campaign. Two of the most critical were informing and activating the membership and building support among local citizens.

“We went out into the community,” said Ricks. “We went into the churches and talked to people on the streets. Wherever we saw people, we talked about the low pay.” And in the weeks leading up to the election, community members spoke up in support of Sussex ESPs and their slate of school board candidates.

“We found that we had a school board that wouldn’t listen,” says Ricks. “That gave us some common ground to build on.”

The new Sussex school board won’t be seated until later this month, but Parham believes the local’s efforts already have paid huge dividends. ESPs have begun attending—and speaking up—at school board meetings.

Compared to two years ago, Sussex ESPs “are bolder,” he says. “They feel like they’re a part of the system—that they have voice and deserve to be heard.”

For more on earning a living wage, go to NEA's pay site.

Just one year ago, Prince George Education Association (PGEA) President Bill Barnes bit his tongue as the chairman of the local school board delivered comments prepared for him by the chairman of the county board of supervisors. The message: employee salaries—specifically a small, overdue pay increase for teachers—were the reason local tax rates were being raised.

Not wanting to jeopardize the pay hike, Barnes held his fire. But he and other members of PGEA dived into the details of the county’s budget and not only disproved that faulty assumption, they launched a campaign that resulted in a recent agreement on an average 8.7-percent increase beginning next year.

“What the school board and board of supervisors have agreed to will amount to the largest transfer of money from the county to the school board in the county’s history,” says Barnes, who’s in his third year as PGEA president and is director of guidance at N.B. Clements Junior High.

The key was getting the two boards to agree to live up to a memorandum of understanding that laid out the revenue streams to be available to fund school programs. “During the past five years, the increase in those revenue streams has been greater than $10 million,” says Barnes. “But the county’s actual contribution to education decreased by nearly $59,000.”

Meanwhile, Prince George fell behind neighboring school divisions with whom it competes for teachers. The Association’s research, confirmed by a study by the school division’s consultant, showed that most Prince George teachers, especially those in midcareer, earned considerably less than their peers in surrounding counties.

Those facts meant the school division stood to lose large number of teachers to better-paying school divisions like Chesterfield and Henrico.  “Many of our teachers live in Chesterfield, which pays more,” says Barnes. “If you figure that teacher is spending $200 a month on gasoline driving to work here and is already behind $200 a month because of the pay scale, they’re losing out by $400 a month.”

Several factors helped turn the tide. For one, the PGEA’s “Nine is Fine” campaign (nine because a 9-percent increase was needed to reach parity with neighboring divisions) energized local members, who packed school board and supervisors meetings to capacity.

Second, the Association played a key role in supporting new candidates for the school board and board of supervisors, and helped seven of their 10 choices win at the ballot box.

And that’s led to the third factor, which is that the school board and board of supervisors are working more harmoniously and productively. “That’s maybe the biggest achievement,” says Barnes.

PGEA’s activism has membership on the upswing. The Association picked up several new members at an April reception for teachers at N.B. Clements. One of them, Whitney Thompson, burst into the room asking Barnes, “Where do I sign up?” (Words any Association leader loves to hear!) Another new member, Margo Beverly, said the new pay scale will boost her pay about $6,000, adding that PGEA’s work securing the raise helped convince her to join. “It’s nice to know that the organization has some power,” she said.

When the Louisa County Board of Supervisors tried to knock $718,000 out of the school budget—cuts that could have voided teacher contracts for 2007-2008 and caused some support employees, nurses, and  counselors to lose their jobs—the Louisa County Education Association (LCEA) stepped up to the plate.

“We needed to be informed, to listen to our members, and to make a stand,” said Hashim Davis, the first-year president of LCEA and a history teacher.

Members of the Board of Supervisors were no doubt surprised to find at least 150 LCEA members, as well as community supporters, overflowing their May 21 meeting. The ample turnout, in addition to heartfelt and pointed testimony from LCEA members and supporters, convinced Supervisors to reverse the mandatory cuts and restore the budget agreement worked out with the school board.

How convincing were LCEA members?

In an unusual move, the Supervisors agreed to move a motion to restore the funds jointly, and to second the motion jointly. They then passed the motion unanimously. By standing together, perhaps the LCEA taught supervisors a lesson!

Davis said the crisis (and its resolution) showed all involved that the Association helps members stand up for themselves. “In the end, it was a boost for the Association,” he said. “Beyond that, it was a sign of solidarity with the community.”

“We knew that this was a crisis situation,” added LCEA member Barbara Wilson, who also serves on the VEA Board of Directors. “We really needed to step up and let people know we have a voice.”