Only hours into the presentation Tuesday, with teachers in nearly all of West Virginia’s 55 counties laying the final preparations for a strike, the state’s Home of Delegates all of a sudden voted to table the costs that had provoked their ire.
The Republican-led House of Delegates voted 53 -45 Tuesday morning to indefinitely table a expense that sought to heavily expand the state’s private charter school system, amongst other procedures to which public school instructors objected. Charter schools have actually been lambasted as a privatization of education that looks for to undercut public school systems, which are paid for by taxation.
”Our students are very first and are not for sale,” Poca High School English teacher Meghan Stevens informed AP. “We think in the power of public education.”
Further, the teachers feel the expense both does not have their input and is also retaliation for last year’s successful strike. Randi Weingarten, president of the across the country American Federation of Teachers, tweeted Tuesday that the West Virginia Senate “is eager to destroy public schools & strike back against its teachers.”
American Federation of Teachers West Virginia Chapter President Fred Albert stated in a declaration that “it was very clear today that the Home heard our voice.”
Cheers erupted from the galleries of the Home in the state capital of Charleston as the vote was made, where hundreds of teachers had assembled to protest the legislation.
However, the strike isn’t officially called off yet. 3 labor unions representing teachers and school service workers told AP they would be consulting with members before deciding on further action.
A year ago, West Virginia’s teachers strolled out of their schools as union negotiations collapsed, demanding much better pay and better working conditions in their class. For 9 days they paralyzed the state’s school system and enthralled a country unused to such extensive strike actions. When West Virginia Governor Jim Justice buckled under the pressure and granted all of the union’s demands, it set off a wave of strikes by teachers across the country who are having a hard time under similar conditions.
Since then, the states of Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona and Washington, and the cities of Los Angeles and Denver have all seen comparable strikes that yielded similar outcomes. Numerous of the districts had not seen strikes by teachers in decades.
On Tuesday, the East Bay Times reported that California’s Oakland Unified School District teachers were set to go on strike Thursday, feeling it is the “only option” left in their struggle for, better incomes for overworked instructors and enhanced spending plans for underfunded trainee services.