KENT — On what was scheduled to be the first day of school, students and teachers at Mill Creek Middle School never made it through the front door. They stood or sat outside by the flagpole, waving signs and yelling at passing motorists.
Teachers in the fourth-largest school district in Washington are ending the second week of a strike, keeping more than 26,000 students at 40 schools out of the classroom.
The strike is not centered on wage and contract issues like most labor disputes. Kent teachers are instead fighting for smaller class sizes, arguing that the district should spend some of the $21 million it has in reserve to alleviate overcrowding.
The district maintains that it needs to hold on to the reserve funds during such poor economic times and that classes are not as crowded as teachers claim. Some teachers complain that they don’t have enough desks for students, with more than 30 students in some elementary and middle school classes.
Teachers said they were ready to stay out as long as it took to convince the school district that classroom overcrowding was not a good recipe for academic achievement. They have drawn the support of a handful of students who took to the picket lines during their extended summer vacation.
“I support them 100 percent in smaller class sizes for a better education,” said eighth-grader Stewart Kunzelman, 13.
Teacher strikes are illegal in Washington, and the district has gone to court to get teachers to return to work. A judge said each teacher will have to pay $200 per day in fines if they are not back in school by Monday.
It is the only teacher strike in the nation taking place this week, and experts said they are becoming rarer across the nation. But that’s not necessarily the case in Washington; teachers in Bellevue held a two-week strike last fall.
Rich Wood, a spokesman for the state’s largest teacher’s union, said strikes are not that common because most states do not allow them and and some ban collective bargaining.
Longer contracts and accommodating teachers who understand the budget pressures school districts are experiencing are two other reasons strikes are becoming rarer, said Janet Bass, spokeswoman for the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union.
According to the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank in Pittsburgh, teacher strikes are legal in only 13 states and the number of strikes has decreased dramatically in the past three decades. There were more than 200 strikes in 1975 and only 28 in the past two school years.
The majority of teacher strikes since 2000 have taken place in three states: Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois, according to the Allegheny Institute. Strong laws, definitive court decisions and high fines prevent strikes in most states, the think tank says.
Wood said strikes in Washington state are about very local issues. Last year’s extended strike in Bellevue focused on district control of curriculum, and the Kent walkout is about class size. Strikes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Illinois last fall concerned salaries and retirement.
Juliet Pugh, the mother of a Kent high school student and an elementary school teacher, was passionate about the teachers’ efforts to shrink class sizes. “Whatever it takes,” Pugh said.
She said there are so many kids in some of her younger daughter’s classes, she has to wait days to talk to a teacher.
“It’s kind of like Martin Luther King having to stand up for what is right,” said her daughter, Ronnisha Hunter, 16, a sophomore at Kentridge High School.
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