A community goes on strike

NEA Today, Sep 1999

When teachers and ESP hit the bricks in Hyde Park, Vermont, they didn't picket alone. Local folks fed them-and fought for them.

Search for the heart of ff ff the community in Hyde Park, a town nestled in a central Vermont valley, and chances are its 450 residents won't direct you to the post office, the municipal building, or a restaurant.

They'll point you to the 100-year-old Hyde Park School, where 40 NEA members work hard to give EC-6 students the best education around.

These school employees used to wonder how much their contribution was valued by local residents. Not any more.

Pushed to the wall last spring by their school board's demands for benefit rollbacks and a blank check to contract out support services, 40 members of the Hyde Park unit of the Lamoille North Education Association-teachers and educational support personnel (ESP) alike-went on strike for more than a week.

In the process, they gained a place in history, conducting Vermont's first ESP strike and combined teacher-ESP walkout, and, ultimately, influencing passage of a state law banning use of "permanent replacements" during an ESP or municipal workers strike.

Better yet, Hyde Park NEA members gained passionate community allies.

Local residents fed the strikers around the clock, advocated for them in the press, and repeatedly urged local and state officials to close the school while unqualified, uncertified replacement teachers "worked" inside.

Parents, other adults, and kids even walked the picket line. All this pressure helped produce an agreement with teacher and ESP pay raises and a compromise on teacher health insurance premiums-while omitting language permitting the privatization of support services.

How was a traditional labor dispute transformed into a community strike? Simple words tell the story:

Openness. Confident that their contract priorities-including respect from the school board and a livable wage-were fair and just, Hyde Park School employees invited community folks to listen and talk at every union gathering, from bargaining caucuses to a mid-strike pot luck dinner.

"It was always a gamble and very scary. You had to be prepared for whoever walked in," recalls fifth grade teacher Amy Earle, a bargaining committee member. "But we felt our proposals were reasonable and that we had nothing to hide."

Appreciation. After talking to NEA members like paraprofessional Laurie Martin, who earns just $8 an hour after 14 years on the job, community residents realized that strikers were driven not by greed, but by commitment to kids and quality.

"Upset by school board threats to privatize support services," says UniServ Director Suzanne Dirmaier, "one parent wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper about how the custodian encouraged her son and gave him a sense of his own worth."

Staff unity. Hyde Park parents might never have rallied behind these NEA members-right up to monitoring their post-strike working conditions-if school staffers hadn't shown support for one another.

Teachers and ESP sat in on each others' bargaining sessions and eventually merged their bargaining teams.

"Teachers had tremendous empathy for the support staff's struggle against privatization and for a living wage," says teacher Amy Earle. "We understand that our success depends on the work of ESP."

"Through the years, teachers and support staff have built an incredible connection," adds para Laurie Martin. "The more we do when we're unified, the easier it is to get the job done!"

New Unionism. "If ever there was a strike that fell into NEA's concept of New Unionism, this is it," sums up UniServ Director Dirmaier. "There was a sense that the school isn't a building, but a part of the larger community.

"What happened in Hyde Park," she adds, "is what needs to happen to build a strong home-school-community partnership: dialogue and shared decision making. This is not a strike the union ran by itself."

For more information, call Vermont-NEA UniServ Director Suzanne Dirmaier at 802/ 223-6375 or send her an E-mail message at Sdirmaier@nea.org.

Parents and neighbors joined support staff and teachers on the picket lines last spring in Vermont's Hyde Park.