Good Evening, President Silkworth, members of the Board of Education, and Dr. Bedell, while I have gotten to know many of you over the years and have spoken at board meetings before, this is my first time speaking as TAAAC President. For those in the audience attending tonight, here’s some of my background. I have spent my entire 23 year career in AACPS: primarily as a high school English teacher. While I love being in the classroom, I am also excited to begin my three-year term.
In August, TAAAC launched our inaugural leadership development conference in which we empowered our union members to be able to advocate to improve their working conditions. All participants received the book, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy by Jane McAlevey. We’ll be doing a book study soon. During the first week back, the TAAAC staff and myself visited about 40 schools to welcome back educators. We’re continuing these visits, making sure we reach every worksite this year. Last week, we had our first Representative Assembly which was well attended with lots of positive energy. The RA is our monthly meeting of our building leaders. We welcome any board member who would like to attend and address our building reps.
We’re glad to start a school year with the news that educator vacancies have gone down while student achievement has gone up. We also appreciate the implementation of the new cell phone policy. I know if I were still in the classroom it would make a huge difference for me by having students less distracted and more focused on their learning.
Unfortunately, it is disappointing that we are beginning the school year without a ratified contract. We hope we can swiftly resolve our impasse so that educators can begin to receive their salary increases for this year.
Over the last 3 years, we’ve seen a 4%, 6%, and 3% COLA. We’re glad that this Board understands that paying educators fairly leads to better student outcomes. Increases in student achievement are not possible without the hard work of our educators who work every day in our schools to meet our students’ academic as well as social-emotional needs. While we have seen larger COLAs in the last three years than we had over the previous decade, last year’s COLA was the only one that went significantly above the inflation rate so it was the first time in many years that we had seen an increase in our salary’s buying power.
Due to the vacancy crisis, we understand that there was a need to focus on recruitment which led to the quick fix in which salary steps 1, 2, and 3 were collapsed to move up beginning educator pay; however, this happened without adjusting the entire pay scale. This means that the salaries of most educators still continue to lag behind those of surrounding counties. This must be addressed: we know that competitive salaries across-the-board are one key to educator retention.
We also agree that other school staff deserve a living wage including our food service workers, teaching assistants, custodial staff, school nurses, and bus drivers. We know that when there are vacancies in one job category it creates stress on the whole system, hurting both students and educators. We also know that we cannot solve these issues by prioritizing one group at the expense of another.
Our union looks forward to working with you to build a stronger school system together. We feel that under Dr. Bedell’s leadership we are turning a corner. However, another factor that impacts educator retention is stress and workload. The newly implemented formative assessment requirements have been an issue in this regard. There are also continuing challenges around Chromebooks with many schools still experiencing shortages. Most importantly, many classroom teachers are struggling with large class sizes while many special educators and related service providers continue to have large caseloads. Every educator wants to be able to successfully complete all that is asked of them. When educators feel that they can’t keep up with growing demands, that is when they decide to leave.
This year, workload is an area that I am hopeful we can work on. TAAAC always comes to the table looking to find solutions. We hope that you will join us as willing partners to find both the short- and long-term solutions to the challenges educators are facing. I know there must be solutions that we can implement now with little or no budgetary impact.
Ultimately the long-term solution to workload is hiring more staff to reduce class sizes and caseloads across all schools. To do this, we invite you to join us so we can advocate together for the necessary county funding we need to address both workload and salary, securing the conditions we need to retain educators. Together we can create the world-class school system that we all know AACPS has the potential to be.
