JWS

As part of the contract campaign, educators were encouraged to speak about what was happening in their classrooms to parents, the school committee, and town meeting members. Two hundred union members lined both sides of the hallway to of the auditorium where town meeting, the town’s legislative body, was being held.

Small meetings were arranged all over the district where parents and educators talked. The union made fliers that compared educators’ vision in contrast to the school committee’s.

For months, union educators hammered away at the committee’s refusal to agree to a work oversight committee that “had teeth.” Educators debated what it would mean to have a true voice in education policy. They told parents how disrespectful the district was in their refusal to respect teachers’ insights. They talked about the top-down and patronizing character of “collaboration” that actually refuses to commit to giving teachers a voice.

Parents have responded well to the campaign. They were shocked to learn about the time teachers were being made to waste on paperwork and data. They had not understood how programming was being imposed from above.

The parents began to speak out at a series of school committee meetings with teachers and paraprofessionals. Pairs of schools teamed up to organize turnout for a given meeting. Dozens of supporters turned out for meeting after meeting. Parents were appalled by how unresponsive the school committee was to them, too.

It was becoming clear to more and more people that the school committee had no idea how to engage in true dialogue with members of the school community and the town. A new organization of parents formed that was not beholden to the conventional channels like the PTO or school site councils.

The union has productive relationships with the PTOs in Brookline. But the parent support for educators in their contract fight led to a new, independent body, the Brookline Parents Organization (BPO). The BEU of course values its relationships with the PTOs, but an independent organization, lacking any institutional obligations to the school committee, has more of a free hand to build community support for the union. Those parents joined teachers in a continued dialogue with individual PTO activists.

The parents worked with teachers to place 750 lawn signs that said “We Trust and Support our Teachers” and hundreds more bumper stickers that read “Fair contracts for Brookline Educators Now.” A support petition with over eight hundred names became an active information-sharing device. A discussion began about the need for a new school committee.

The union also models its vision in its bargaining practice. One bargaining team represents all job categories, and all members of each bargaining unit advocate for one another. Because the team knows that they are beholden to the union’s membership, which will vote on whether or not to ratify the contract, all constituent parts are kept in mind.

Out of this process, battle lines have emerged not only over wages but also over who will control schooling. We’ve rejected the idea of secret bargaining in favor of an open discussion with parents. The educators have built a mutually respectful relationship between the union and community organizations based on trust. The struggle is pointing to the possibility of a full-scale political realignment in Brookline along a gender- and race-inflected fault line of class.