Portland teachers union could be headed toward a strike

The Portland Association of Teachers’ nearly 4,500 union members are currently working without a contract. The union has been in mediation with Portland Public Schools since late August, and both parties have repeatedly stated they would like to avoid a strike. Angela Bonilla, president of the Portland Association of Teachers, tells us what teachers and coaches are hoping for, and what the start of the school year has been like.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller:  This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. As most people with a connection to Portland Public Schools (PPS) probably know by now, a strike is looming in the near future. The administration and the teachers union, the Portland Association of Teachers, started negotiating a new contract back in January. Some of the big issues include teacher pay, planning time and support services. The two sides turned to mediation at the end of last month. But that didn’t yield any breakthroughs either.

The union described the mediated sessions as “frustrating and largely fruitless.” They declared an impasse and they said that without major concessions on the part of the district, the only route to a just settlement will be the full mobilization of all educators toward a strike action. We are in conversation with the PPS administration and hope to have them on this show within the week. But today I’m joined by Union President Angela Bonilla. Welcome back to the show.

Angela Bonilla:  Thanks for having me.

Miller:  We’re talking right now on Tuesday at a little after noon. Do you think a strike is gonna happen?

Bonilla:  Oh, I hope not. We want to, as educators, always be prepared for any kind of outcome. So we are organizing, we had our art build this past weekend. But as of now, it’s really up to the district as to whether those concessions will happen and whether we’ll have a strike.

Miller:  Has your bargaining team prepared your final offer? This is sort of a technical thing after the impasse.

Bonilla:  Yes. So we submitted our final offer, our district-mandated offer, on Friday, as did the district. We also sent over a student centered proposal which is not official or mandated by law. But it’s a few of our other demands that the district has decided they do not want to see in our final offer because it’s not mandated by law, pay and workload relief. We always say that our working conditions are student’s learning conditions. And when it comes to class sizes, we have had extremely large class sizes, which leads to extreme increases in workload. I’m hearing of kindergarten classes, in some schools, of 28 students. I talked to an educator at Lincoln [High School]. They have 185 students across six periods. So those aren’t conditions students can learn under, and are extremely difficult for educators to prepare for.

Miller:  And what exactly are you asking for, in terms of the way the district would manage class sizes?

Bonilla:  The district typically rebalances classes in October. And so they plan for less classes than we will actually need. And then in October, they’ll add more educators and then split up classes. We’ve always maintained that that’s not a student centered approach. Kids should know their educators at the start of the year, not be ripped from a community they’ve built, to go with another educator. And we believe that we can open more classrooms within schools for students in order to keep those class sizes low.

Miller:  So you’re saying hire more teachers?

Bonilla:  Hire more teachers. I mean, look at Baker City. They increased salaries for educators and they started this year with zero vacancy. So the educators are out there. They want to work. They just want to work in workable conditions.

Miller:  The first thing you mentioned though was teacher pay. Where exactly are you? I mean, are you still at your initial ask?

Bonilla:  Yes. And we’re at that initial ask because that’s what it’s going to take for us to catch up and keep up with inflation, so we can be competitive with the other 13 districts in our metro area.

Miller:  And what is that, for people who haven’t heard it yet?

Bonilla:  For the first year we’re asking for an 8.5% cost of living adjustment, the second year 7%, and the year after that 6%.

Miller:  The district, if I’m not mistaken, and looking at the most recent counter proposal, is an overall pay increase of a little over 12% or 12.5%, phasing in over three years - 4% a year.

Bonilla:  Their final offer was 4%, 3% and 3%. Four and three and three on the ERB website.

Miller:  What’s wrong with that?

Bonilla:  Well, we have had an inflation rate of almost 18% over the last few years and our salary has only gone up about 10%, in terms of cost of living adjustments. And so we are just about 8.5% behind. And our educators feel it. It’s hard to go grocery shopping. It’s hard to pay your mortgage because we continue to have a pay cut by not keeping up with inflation.

Miller:  A week and a half ago the district said it was disappointing that you declared an impasse without offering a counter proposal. They said that you’re not making any compromises or modifications on a whole list of your requests or your proposals. What’s your response?

Bonilla:  Yes. So the proposal that we were given during the last day of mediation was presented to us as a quote unquote “supposal,” so not an official proposal, just a conceptual proposal. And through that concept, we saw that there was an offer of 4% with an added work day, which is, in effect, 3.5%. And what we know is that our educators… I mean my inbox is flooded… cannot afford to live in the city at that rate. And so when we’re told by someone who’s making $206,000 a year that we need to ask for less, it’s really insulting to our educators. Because 3.5% doesn’t pay the rent. It doesn’t pay the mortgage when we have lost pay, including when it comes to retirement costs and how PERS is funded.

Miller:  So do I understand you correctly in saying that the salary increase ask is not negotiable? That number is that number and until you get there, you will not agree on anything?

Bonilla:  I think for the second and third years, we have some wiggle room. And we’re willing to think through what that would look like. But that 8.5%, that first year, really is to make up lost ground and ensure that we are on par with other districts. If we have that 8.5% we will be making almost as much as our Beaverton counterparts, at the top of the scale. We’d earn about $130 more a year than they do. So, it really does make us competitive with other districts. And our question is always, if others can, why can’t we, as the largest district, the most funded district in the state?

Miller:  So it seems like there is some wiggle room. If they go to 8-point something percent, as opposed to 4%, then you’re willing to get back in the room and talk more. Is that a fair way to put it?

Bonilla:  Somewhat? I mean, we already have three other sessions scheduled during this 30-day cooling down period. And we scheduled those before we left our last mediation meeting because we want to get to a resolution. The problem is that our district managers do not see the urgency that we are feeling on the ground. And it feels like they do not believe us when we are explaining how unbearable this work has become for our educators.

Miller:  What do you mean by that? What are you telling district leaders and what do you think they’re not understanding or believing?

Bonilla:  Yeah. So all of our sessions are on YouTube and there was one session where I shared [that] educators feel like these conditions are unbearable. And we need workload relief. We need staffing for the mental health needs that are coming up that we’re seeing since COVID closures. And we had PPS managers on the other side say, “Well, when I visit schools, I see smiling faces, it doesn’t seem so unbearable.” [They’re] literally saying those things.

I’ve also shared [that] we had a meeting with representatives elected by their schools and they shared the same conditions. They were saying, “It doesn’t. I love my kids. I love my community. I love the parents. But I do not like working for this district because it’s so hard to do the right thing.” And we were told, “Well, I can find 120 people who would say they love working here.” So there’s a lack of respect and lack of acknowledgment of our lived experience that makes it really difficult to find a compromise.

Miller:  As you well know, because this is your life, students and families had to deal with a ton of disruptions in the course of the pandemic, especially for the first year and a half or so. How do you think about those super disrupted years which, in some ways, we haven’t recovered from in terms of classroom behavior, in terms of test scores, in terms of just being used to being in a classroom. How do you think about all that, in the context of a potential strike?

Bonilla:  Yeah, I mean, that is why we want to find a resolution and not get to that point of a strike. Our families, our whole community, have experienced a collective trauma through those COVID closures and also the experiences of having COVID in our homes. And all of our teachers are our community members and parents in our own district, many of them. So we are also feeling that concern. And I think we’re at a point where the trajectory of our district has been in such disarray.

There’s an increase in funding for administrative positions while they’re decreasing classroom positions. And that’s been a pattern over several years that the secretary of state has also called out. And so we’re at this point where, when we ask, “Well, what about the kids?” The response is: exactly. We can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

Miller:  When you’ve talked in the past about the increase in administrative positions and costs, the district has pointed out that to some extent, that is due to an increase in student services, the exact kind of services that you’re talking about. Mental health support for example. I mean, do you acknowledge that is part of the reason for the central budget increase because those are not tied to schools?

Bonilla:  No. So we’ve had this conversation multiple times, because they’ve also in the past said, “Oh we cut positions from the central office.” And what they meant is that they cut special ed positions and custodial positions because those are based in the central office. What we are seeing in the report that we just put out called “A Manufactured Crisis” around the district budgets, is an increase in administrative and non represented positions that are not necessarily based in buildings. And it is not just our student services. It’s administrators and program managers, folks who are helping create all these other systems and administer all these initiatives. We’re saying, “Let’s slow down. Let’s go back to basics. How do we make sure students have everything they need inside their schools?”

Miller:  They say that part of the claims you have made in the past, and perhaps are still making, are based on data that the Oregon Department of Education coded incorrectly. They say that PPS classroom spending has not decreased from 49% to 29% but has remained flat, remains the same?

Bonilla:  Yes. So we finally got the corrected data from ODE. That’s the data that PPS gives to ODE and ODE creates a way to look [at it], apples to apples. With the new data we’ve still found that there is a decrease in instructional spending while there is an increase in administrative spending. It is not to the degree of the original data, but it has not stayed level. And actually, within the last year, the investment into instructional budgets has gone down about 3%.

Miller:  So what are examples of administrative costs now that you actually think are a waste of money? If, in a sense, you’re saying the district is spending too much money at the central/administrative level, that money should instead go to more teachers and/or more money for teachers. What is PPS spending money on currently that you think it should not?

Bonilla:  I think the answer is when you start clicking through all the organizational charts. So we have a lot of folks in charge of a lot of different work that does not seem that different from the ground and is not impacting our ability to do our work.

Miller:  But I’m asking what are some of those things for people who haven’t clicked through yet? I mean can you name names of projects or programs?

Bonilla:  Right now, we have a lot of folks in special ed really focused on the idea of inclusion, which is really important and awesome when implemented correctly. To implement it correctly, you need additional staff so that students can be supported and given their free and appropriate education in a general education classroom. And as that project continues, without conversation with the union, we’re seeing less special educators being able to do their work. They’re being overloaded with staff with cases. And then the conversation becomes, well, if we had inclusion it would look a little different. So I think sometimes it’s around positions in departments that are looking into initiatives and goals that the district has placed forward. And then those goals are not necessarily directly impacting students on the ground.

Miller:  If the next three scheduled sessions do not work, do not yield some kind of breakthrough, when would a strike be likely to happen?

Bonilla:  According to our timelines, the district is correct that the earliest possible date of a strike would be October 23rd, I think they said. But before there’s a strike, we have to give 10 days notice. So we would give that notice as soon as we thought that we hit a point of no more compromise.

Miller:  Angela Bonilla, thanks very much.

Bonilla:  Thank you.

Miller:  Angela Bonilla is the president of the Portland Association of Teachers. It is the union that represents teachers in Portland Public Schools. As I mentioned earlier, we are in conversation with the district and we hope to have a representative from PPS on soon.

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