Across Oklahoma, teachers, labor organizers, parents and school boards are taking steps to follow West Virginia in launching their first major strike since 1990 to demand higher pay from the state Legislature.
On Thursday, the Oklahoma Education Assn. teachers union plans to unveil a shutdown strategy and a proposed funding measure to pressure lawmakers to boost spending for education in the state. The union said 80% of more than 10,000 respondents to an online survey backed closing schools in support of a walkout.
Association President Alicia Priest said the union was "working toward" bringing all districts on board with a possible walkout, as in West Virginia, though she said "not everyone is on board yet, and that's OK."
"The goal is not a walkout," Priest said. "The goal is for us to have funding for public education to best meet the needs of our students."
Next week, teachers in Tulsa, one of the state's biggest school districts, plan to engage in a work-to-rule protest — a labor slowdown in which workers do only the minimum amount of work required. They have the backing of top administrators, who said they plan to support a teacher walkout and school shutdowns "should they become necessary."
"We have a really hard time holding on to our wonderful folks and recruiting others," said Deborah Gist, superintendent of Tulsa Public Schools, which has 3,000 educators and 40,000 students. "We lost 22% of our teachers last year, and over the last couple of years, more than 30% in total."
The public, including business leaders and parents, "knows what a huge problem we have here in our state and are ready to do something bout it," Gist said.
In the space of just a few days, 55,000 people have joined an Oklahoma teacher's private Facebook group titled "Oklahoma Teacher Walkout - The Time Is Now!" where educators have been discussing the basics of how a walkout would work. How would a walkout affect mandatory testing? Would teachers still get paid?
"If this does, in fact, happen [fingers-crossed emoji], I'd like to work on somehow getting food to kiddos who rely on school for their meals!!" one third-grade teacher wrote. "If any of you have any ideas, connections, etc... PM [private message] me!!"
Talk of a possible walkout had been brewing for months, even before the West Virginia strike, as lawmakers struggled to pass funding measures that might raise teacher pay.
The average salary of Oklahoma teachers in 2016 was $42,760, which falls several thousand dollars below the average salaries in neighboring states such as Texas ($51,890), Arkansas ($48,218) and Kansas ($47,755), according to the most recently available data from the National Education Assn. The highest-paid teachers in the NEA rankings are in New York, earning an average of $79,152. California teachers, at No. 2, earn an average of $77,179.
