District, union leaders on the Portland teachers strike

The first teacher strike in Portland Public Schools history is currently underway. Schools have closed across the district, which is Oregon’s largest, as teachers lobby for better pay and working conditions. Renard Adams is the chief of research, assessment and accountability for PPS. Angela Bonilla is the president of the Portland Association of Teachers. They join us with back-to-back perspectives on where things stand between the district and the union.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We’re going to start today on this second day of the Portland Public Schools strike with conversations with the district and the union. We flipped a coin before the show to determine who would go first. The union won. So Angela Bonilla joins me now. She is the president of the Portland Association of Teachers. Welcome back to the show.

Angela Bonilla: Thanks for having me.

Miller: So on Monday, Governor Tina Kotek urged you and the district to stay at the table, urged you not to strike. The Oregonian Editorial Board did the same a few days before that. You yourself have said that you did not want this strike. Why did you and the membership decide to go forward with it?

Bonilla: Yeah. So we know that we have been at the bargaining table since January and we made it clear to the district bargaining team that we are going to follow the legal timeliness for bargaining and that they need to come with serious proposals to the table. Since then, we have offered several dates and would only receive four hours here, four hours there, from the district bargaining team during our regular bargaining. The only side of our bargaining table that has ever canceled bargaining was the district team. So we’ve been at the table, we continue to be at the table, and unfortunately, we have not received the types of proposals that would keep our educators in the buildings, working, while we continue to do this work.

Miller: What are they going to accomplish with this strike?

Bonilla: I think we are going to accomplish the foundation of a quality education. Right now, our educators have been overworked. They’ve been spread so thin with every new initiative and expectation and standard placed on their plates and they don’t have the time they need to plan and to give students feedback and they don’t have the salaries they need to be able to afford to live in the city. So we hope the strike sends a clear message to the district that they need to come to the table ready to bargain.

Miller: As of course you know, the district says that they support many of the issues that you’ve brought up, that you’re on the same page in terms of your overall desires, but they simply do not have the $200-plus million dollars that you’re demanding. Where are you saying they can get that money from?

Bonilla: So one thing to note is that $200-plus [million dollars], that number that continues to grow [in] every interview I read, is across three years. And yet when we talk about their budgets, they’re talking about a one year budget. So it’s really important to note that the reality is the difference between our cost of living proposals across all three years is about $37 million per year. And so we know that this is a possible proposal. There are options around ensuring that their ending fund balance is reinvested in schools, especially because they continue to pad that balance with recurring funds from the state school fund.

Miller: One thing that’s been circulating among some parents is uncertainty about what kinds of support that they can take advantage of right now to prevent their kids from falling behind. It was crystallized for a lot of folks in a letter sent by the Grout Elementary school PTA that was signed by teachers. They asked parents to not use things like Chromebooks provided by the district. They wrote this, “One easy way to show support for our teachers, students and the union community is to send a letter refusing to accept these resources during the strike.” I understand that that letter was not written by your union. But do you agree with it? Do you think that parents, including those with fewer resources, should refuse to accept resources given by the district?

Bonilla: Well, we believe that every parent needs to make the choice that’s best for their students and their families. Obviously, we think that it’s better to have certified educators in front of your students rather than a computer screen. But if you’re a parent with multiple little ones and you need to get to the bathroom, sometimes you gotta put them in front of a screen. What we heard from parents, because this letter originated, I believe at Dunaway, is that families who have access, who have privilege that has helped cement the gaps between students in our schools during COVID, do not want to continue to contribute to widening that gap by accessing resources that they know students with less access cannot have. The district has not provided WiFi, as far as I know, to the families who needed it like they did it during COVID. So students are taking Chromebooks home they won’t even be able to use, for some of these families.

So my understanding of that letter and that ask was really asking that we stand united, that we demand the district and bring actual decision makers to the table from the school board and that we don’t let ourselves continue to perpetuate the harm and widen the gap when they could stand in solidarity with families who don’t have the access and privilege of educating their kids at home during a strike.

Miller: Do you feel, do you fear, that there is an expiration date on community support if this strike lingers?

Bonilla: As we’ve said multiple times, we know the community is behind us. We know that almost 90% of Oregonians support teachers going on strike in order to ensure that there are less students per teacher, so that they can give them that individualized attention, as well as for our wages and planning time. I think we’re always worried about losing the support from our community. But we also know that we have been working very hard to build those connections with our community. We have built the trust with our community and let them know that we are not going to do things in order to harm students. We’re going to do things to make a better education system for students. It is up to the district to come to the table with actual proposals, so that we can get to a settlement, and for the district to bring the school board to the table, so we can get to a settlement.

Miller: When are you scheduled to be back at the negotiating table?

Bonilla: We are scheduled to be back tomorrow around 9:30. And our bargaining team actually just finished meeting to talk through settlement and other proposals because we want to make sure that we’re ready to get to that end point as soon as possible.

Miller: Is there any point on which you have moved your position from where you were when we talked a month ago?

Bonilla: Well, we have reduced our ask for cost of living adjustment in our student-centered package. We have removed the five-day suspension language from our proposal in favor of ensuring that students have the support they need to be safe before they return to a classroom in which they have harmed an educator physically. And we have moved on a few other proposals in our student-centered package, but the district has refused to look at that permissive package and has refused to give us proposals back on class size caps for Title 1 schools. So our position is that we need to make sure our school district has the foundation to best serve students and to support their educators in doing so, and we’re going to do whatever it takes to get language in our contract that ensures that.

Miller: Angela Bonilla, thanks very much.

Bonilla: Thank you.

Miller: Angela Bonilla is the president of the Portland Association of Teachers.

I’m joined now by Dr. Renard Adams. He is the chief of research, assessment and accountability for the district. Welcome back to the show.

Renard Adams: Thank you for having me, Dave. Appreciate it.

Miller: What’s happening at the district offices right now? What are you doing to try to find a resolution?

Adams: We, the bargaining team, continue to meet between mediation sessions to look at what’s possible. We’re crunching numbers. We understand that our proposal on the table right now will require budget cuts this current year and into the future years and so we’re looking at some options and having conversations about that.

Miller: Are you looking at every administrator at the district level or at the school level to say, is this position necessary? However important it is, is it more important than paying teachers more or having more teachers? Has it gotten to that nitty-gritty level?

Adams: Well, what I’d like to share in response to that is our district administration is about $60 million a year. It includes custodians, administrative assistants as well as levels of administrators and we could cut all of Central Office and we couldn’t put a dent in the proposal that the union has proposed. We will be looking at operational efficiencies from the Central Office to see what we can save. And we’ve also, I would like to add, have done that coming into this year.

Miller: I’m actually thinking less about the Central Office and more about school-level administrators, about assistant vice-principals, about directors of this or that, who are school-based and who I assume are good people doing important jobs. But I’m wondering if there are people at the district level who are saying, in a kind of fiscal emergency, is this necessary?

Adams: Thank you for the question and for the clarification. What I’d like to say in response to that is that we know that our administrators working in schools, along with our educators, play a vital role in the education of our students. And our every effort would be to save schools from the impacts of the settlement that we reached to the extent fully possible.

Miller: But that didn’t quite answer the question I’m asking you. Are you currently looking to say should these positions exist?

Adams: Yes, we are currently looking at all positions. We’re opening and looking under every cushion to see where there might be possibilities. But it would be premature of me to say that we’re looking at actually cutting any particular positions because we’re looking at everything on the table, including services, the students, Central Office efficiencies, and the like.

Miller: Is there any scenario in which you could accept a hard cap on class sizes? It’s one of the issues that Angela Bonilla had brought up at the end there and something we’ve talked about before.

Adams: I would say, I don’t believe that the district is in a position to accept hard class caps. We’ve seen these play out in the Saint Paul School District in Minnesota. We want students to have access to their neighborhood schools and at the elementary level, and at the middle and high school level, we want students to have access to highly preferred and desirable electives that keep them coming to school and to their graduation requirements. And so at this time, we’re not at a point where we’re willing to accept those hard class caps because of what they mean for what students would need to do.

Miller: I want to give you a chance to respond to the basic budget question that I brought up with Angela Bonilla, talking about the $200-plus million dollar gap between what they’ve been asking for and what you have said is possible. She said that it’s a mistake to look at it as a single number. We’re talking about this spread out over three years. Just to remind us, if you were to capitulate, what would that expenditure mean?

Adams: Sure. So first, I want to clarify that the entire PAT last and final offer proposal costs approximately $371 million. Our proposal on the table is roughly around $120 million and that creates the gap that we’re talking about. That is over three years and what it would require us to do is we would be required to do deeper and deeper cuts each year because right now, for example, our adopted budget is $833 million. And we’re looking at potentially finding tens of millions of dollars of cuts in this year’s budget to meet our proposal that we’ve done. And that number increases over the coming years because, as you give salary increases, for example, those compound over time.

Miller: Cuts, I mean, in most businesses and nonprofits and institutions, it’s people who are the majority of the expenses. I assume that’s the case for Portland Public Schools. So when you say cuts, do you mean that teacher positions would have to be cut?

Adams: I don’t wanna necessarily say that teacher positions would have to be cut. But you are accurate to say that most of our money goes into schools - 90% according to ODE reporting and over 80% of our funding is in people. And so we are in a people business and so we will be forced to make some very tough decisions based on where we settle this agreement.

Miller: But where else could that money…I mean, as you said before, you could get rid of the entire district office, Central Office, and that’s only $60 million. And so, I mean, how else would you make up hundreds of millions of dollars that you say you don’t have if it weren’t for cutting teachers?

Adams: Right, and so we know we have to work…our plan is to work within our means and not extend ourselves beyond our means because we don’t want to lose classroom teachers. We don’t want to lose vital student services, which is why we don’t have that funding right now and which is why we can’t meet the union’s proposal.

Miller: Where does this leave families, students, everybody right now who are listening?

I mean, in a sense, it just doesn’t sound like there has been any meaningful movement on either side since we talked a month ago. The big difference is that the strike has begun. We’re in, obviously, day two of a strike. I’m struggling to see any glimmer of hope for a compromise. Do you see the possibility right now?

Adams: Well, I wanna say that I do. I’m ever the optimist and I wanna believe that we can compromise. We have moved four times on compensation and our last offer, we moved one-fourth time on planning time. What we haven’t seen from the Association is movement on their best and final offer which was predicated on their January proposals. Bargaining takes both sides to compromise. We have to agree on the realities of our fiscal means and then find some compromise within that to reach an agreement.

Miller: Our education reporter, Natalie Pate, has heard some teachers say that they think the district plans to extend the strike to the point in December when teachers and their families would lose their health insurance benefits. What’s your response to that assertion, that fear?

Adams: We want to settle this contract as quickly as possible. We’ve told our mediator that we are willing to meet day, night, over the weekends and we’ve accepted those dates. She’s called us back this Friday and she also told us that she would call us impossibly over the weekend to do additional mediation sessions. I’m hopeful that this time when she tries to call us over the weekend, that PAT will take up on, and accept that, because the last time she tried to call us in, last Sunday, PAT did not accept that.

So what I would say to families is that the district is ready, willing and able to be at the table. We offered bargaining dates over the summer. Those were declined. We also offered dates in August and then the Association called for mediation. Once they called for mediation, we made ourselves fully available. My calendar is clear. Any meeting that I have is not as important as being at the table trying to settle this contract.

Miller: Renard Adams, I have a feeling we will talk again. Thanks very much.

Adams: Thank you.

Miller: Dr. Renard Adams is the chief of research, assessment and accountability for Portland Public Schools.

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.