Teachers and faculty members walk in front of the high school with signs Wednesday afternoon in Centralia.
In case you’ve been under a rock for the past week or so, or haven’t seen the picket lines, we’ll remind you — Centralia teachers are on strike.
As in most cases, the issue is not black and white, and in our opinion there’s plenty of blame to spread around for the current situation.
In all, representatives from the Centralia Education Association — the union representing Centralia teachers — and the Centralia School District have met well over a dozen times to hash out the terms of a new teachers’ contract.
The exact details of their negotiations aren’t available — contract negotiations aren’t matters of public record — but we do know a few things.
Most recently, the school district has offered teachers an 11.3 percent increase this year, followed by a 1.9 percent increase next year. A teacher’s starting salary would be $46,293 and the highest salary would be $87,256 in the first year of the contract.
The CEA did not accept those terms and has argued that it wants fair contracts with wages comparable to other area school districts, and are getting short-changed by the district.
The median household income in Lewis County, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is $44,526. The per capita (per person) income is listed as $22,947. Even without the raise, teachers are some of Lewis County’s best paid professionals.
Aside from the proposed terms of the contract, from our perspective, the negotiations have been adversarial from the beginning, with both sides firmly entrenched in their positions.
That problem has only been worsened by the district’s own actions. School Board members have only recently been directly involved with negotiations, and at a recent school board meeting teachers picketing were excluded on the basis of a meeting room’s maximum occupancy.
Clearly, the school district has bigger meeting rooms. From our perspective, that was a huge mistake. There’s no excuse for shouting down free speech. These teachers have every right to protest and every right to speak their minds at school board meetings.
State Sen. John Braun took his turn fanning the flames in his home district last month by suggesting that teachers view increased state funding as a “gold mine” and that lawmakers should intervene in a potential strike by seeking an injunction to force teachers to work, rather than strike.
Letter writers to The Chronicle have suggested threatening striking teachers with arrest — it’s technically not legal for teachers to strike in Washington, but no penalty exists in state law.
It’s safe to say, none of that is making the negotiations go any smoother.
Centralia teachers aren’t the only ones on the picket lines. The first day of school at Tumwater and Rainier school districts have also been delayed by strikes. Several Clark County districts also went on strike, but have since made tentative agreements.
At the root of this statewide drama is confusion resulting from the Legislature’s fix of the so-called McCleary decision, in which the state Supreme Court ruled the Legislature wasn’t fully funding education, so we’ll give the state Legislature a heaping portion of blame as well.
As part of the fix, the state this year allocated more money for teachers’ salaries to individual districts — a little more than $2 million in Centralia’s case — but left it up to the individual districts to negotiate with their teachers’ unions on pay.
On the face of it, the money was intended to offset money districts were paying out of levy funds — local taxes — to supplement the state funding, which the Supreme Court ruled was sub-standard. It sounds simple, but the confusion over exactly how districts are supposed to allocate that funding has led to lengthy negotiations, strikes and near-strikes throughout the state.
We on The Chronicle’s Editorial Board recognize the need to weigh in on this situation, but it’s hard to take sides. On the one hand, we heartily believe teachers make the difference in our children’s futures and that they deserve a fair wage.
On the other hand, the school district has a duty to safeguard public money. With major construction projects ongoing at three schools, the district has to watch its budget very carefully, and has already offered teachers an 11.3 percent raise and salaries higher than the median household income for the region.
We all want what’s best for our kids. Now we just have to learn to play nice.
