A member is a member is a member

NEA Today, Feb 2001

By working as one, teachers and support staff in South Dakota are earning respect at the bargaining table and in the community.

South Dakota, the state with the nation's lowest average teacher pay, is the kind of place where teachers need every last friend they can get. Small wonder that teachers and other certified staffers in the state's largest city, Sioux Falls, have turned to the folks who know them and the kids they teach the best: educational support personnel.

Certified members of the Sioux Falls Education Association have linked arms with paraeducators and office employees in two sister NEA local affiliates to build a ground-breaking partnership based on information sharing, mutual respect, and trust.

It's an alliance that, when fully matured, will extend from mutual assistance in worksite organizing to joint lobbying in the state capital for increased education funding.

The seeds of this partnership were sown more than five years ago when NEA helped form the KEY-Kids, Education, and You-Network, a coalition of eight school district employee organizations affiliated to either NEA or unions that belong to the AFL-CIO.

In its short life, the KEY Network has successfully elected a pro-public education school board.

But the district's teacher-ESP partnership really got a jump start in 1999, when the NEA locals started meeting monthly. Local presidents Gail Swenson, Karen Fossum, and Helen Schlueter would swap information, devise common strategies for challenges like member recruitment, and plan projects to help involve every member.

"It takes a lot of time and effort to get through problems," says Schlueter, an accounts payable clerk who heads the Sioux Falls Association of Educational Secretaries. "But I see a change in attitudes between teachers and support staff because of this process."

By talking and collaborating, she adds, teachers come "to understand ESP problems as much as we understand theirs, and it's easier to get closer to what we all want."

Among the collaboration payoffs:

* Membership growth. Organized cadres from the three locals train and work together to implement an effective recruitment strategy based on repeated personal contacts with the nonmember-- even from NEA members outside that person's bargaining unit.

"A member is a member is a member," stresses Sioux Falls Education Association President Gail Swenson.

"We don't try to `guilt' the nonmember into joining," she notes. "When we approach new teachers, for example, we talk about things like liability coverage, having someone to turn to for help, and the networking advantages of Association membership."

* Added respect from the superintendent and school board. It's often tempting for managers to pit one group against another, but Sioux Falls certified staffers and ESP don't make it easy. The three local presidents share grievance updates and bargaining information and debunk misinformation that could divide employees and undermine unity.

Management is "aware that we are working together, and that makes them think," observes Swenson. "They see us sitting together and commenting to one another at school board meetings."

* Greater strength in bargaining. As a consequence of unity, ESP have closed the rights and benefits gap with teachers-and are on the way to closing another gap.

"In our last negotiations, we finally got the same percentage offer as teachers," says Karen Fossum, president of the Sioux Falls Educational Assistants Association. "That made us feel better-it was a respect issue."

Closing gaps creates new openings at the bargaining table. Helen Schlueter would like to see all three contracts expire on a common date, and she also predicts that her clerical members will next push for "more money and language changes" that reflect the value of their work.

* Higher visibility in the community. Sioux Falls teachers and ESP are also collaborating on American Education Week activities and the Children First campaign, an effort sponsored jointly by the South Dakota Education Association, the Sioux Falls ABC-TV affiliate, and the Dacotah Bank.

The three Sioux Falls NEA locals work together on both statewide and local Children First projects. Locally, they plan everything from the distribution of parent and teen education materials to serving dinners to the homeless.

"One of our past activities," reports Fossum, "was distributing books to needy kids at `The Banquet,' a soup kitchen. Some of these kids had never had their own books. We-ESP and teachers-all worked on this together!"

* A louder voice in the state capital. Gail Swenson regularly reports back to the monthly local presidents' meeting on her involvement with the statewide Invest in Education coalition. Last year, the coalition tried and failed to get state lawmakers to maintain state school aid in the face of declining student enrollment.

This year, the coalition will be back in force to push for an annual improvement factor in the state aid formula, set at the rate of inflation plus 2 percent.