KO

Oh yeah. I think everyone understands that these attacks are on all of us and that they harm everybody. Basically CPS, and their new budgeting formulas and all the paperwork and everything, everyone understands they’re just trying to decrease the money going to special education. Which is going to harm everyone’s ability to teach because every gen-ed teacher knows what it’s like to have a child that needs special-ed services and is not getting them, and disrupts your classroom. I would say that we’re pretty united on fighting back.

The second it became clear that this contract was going to pass and people were going to accept it, we immediately sat down with a bunch of special-ed teachers and started writing a resolution. Some of us rank-and-file special-ed teachers helped write it up and we circulated it around among other teachers and clinicians to get feedback.

The resolution itself ended up basically saying that CTU is committed to launching a campaign to defend special education, to protect our working conditions, to fight back against all these new paperwork requirements and cuts that are coming to special education — all the stuff we’ve been talking about. It was a resolution that commits to using the power of our union and our staffers to actually fight this. It passed, I think unanimously, in the House of Delegates [the CTU’s representative governing body made up of rank-and-file teachers].

We’re going to organize our union so that we use this power not just for a strike, but to organize to do collective actions continuously, not just following the state’s timeline through the bargaining process. We’re going to be in a constant state of collective action so that we can fight whatever they throw at us.

Because this is not the last thing they’re going to throw at us. They’re going to come up with some brand new terror. Like, “Oh, by the way, we’re closing a hundred schools.” We don’t know what they’re going to do.

We also included things in our resolution that were ways to model and help our delegates to become more united and work with each other more. So it’s not just that leadership tells us, “This is what’s happening,” and we sit there and take notes and go back to our members. Rather, it’s a two-way street where we’re saying we want to do something around these issues.

So we had them send out sample grievances so that every school can file them around the new paperwork requirements and the things that were threatening to harm our kids. People still want to do something. We mobilized and were ready to walk off the job. We’re ready for more hardcore job actions, and we need to tap into that, instead of taking hit after hit after hit.