The Seattle teachers strike is now in its third day, and it’s stirring up memories for people who lived through past strikes, especially 35 miles north of Seattle in Marysville, which set a state record for the longest teacher walkout.
One of the people paying close attention to the Seattle strike is Elaine Hanson, who was president of the Marysville Education Association in September 2003, when 98 percent of teachers voted to go on strike.
She’s been watching interviews with Seattle teachers on the picket line and says, “My heart goes out to them.”
She says there were a lot of reasons why about 690 Marysville teachers and counselors went on strike when she was at the helm of the union.
“Probably the biggest one is they were going to cut our pay,” Hanson said.
At the time, Marysville argued that under its plan most teachers would actually get raises. The district was trying to shift teachers off of the local pay scale they’d been using, which benefited teachers with the most seniority, and instead use the state’s teacher compensation scale.
'Disrespected'
For Jim Pankiewicz, who had been teaching for almost 30 years, the Marysville proposal was a slap in the face. He says teachers were also being asked to work 10 days without pay.
“Not only would I say that the board disrespected us, I would say they had open contempt for us,” Pankiewicz said.
Neither side budged, and the strike dragged on through all of September and into October.
Gov. Gary Locke urged them to end it. One parent group calling itself Tired of the Strike sued the teachers association and the district. Dean Henry was one of those parents.
He says the atmosphere turned ugly. For example, he says that if parents talked about the difficulty of paying for child care, they’d get swatted down.
“If anybody said that, they’d just pounce on them and say, 'Oh, you just want free day care, you don’t want teachers,’ and it was just garbage like that,” he said.
For students, it meant an extension of summer, but also a lot of boredom, according to Emily Wicks, who was a senior at Marysville-Pilchuck High School. She says they got creative in finding ways to entertain themselves.
No School? Let's Throw Paintballs
“All I remember is this game that everyone created. You’d run from one place to another on foot and a group of people would drive in a car with paintballs and we would hit people when we’d find them on the street,” Wicks said. “And that’s how bored people got. We just did not have anything to do.”
She and other students at the high school held a sit-in to urge the teachers and administrators to come to an agreement.
“It was a confusing time for us, because we loved our teachers, we respected them, and we also respected our parents, and we also wanted to go back to school,” Wicks said. “We just really wanted everyone to work it out.”
In the end, a county judge ordered the teachers to go back to school, and the teachers voted to comply. The strike had gone on for 49 days.
“Everybody wanted to be teaching. They did not want to be on the picket line – that’s not where they spend September,” Hanson said. “September’s in their classroom and they’re excited and they’ve got new ideas, and now it’s October and we’re still not in the classroom. When it came to the court case, I think that was kind of the extra push that just said OK, we’ve got to change our tactic, we’ve got to keep fighting for what’s right but fight in another way.”
The teachers went back to school without a contract, and when they did get a new contract, in spring of 2004, Hanson said it “was not great,” but she said they did manage to avoid a pay cut.
Change At The Top
Hanson says the teachers shifted their focus to getting voters to oust some school board members.
“We elected three new people, which told me the town was supporting us,” Hanson said.
That new board brought in a new superintendent. The man who was hired to help the Marysville school district heal was Larry Nyland. Now he’s superintendent in Seattle, tasked with resolving this latest strike.
Hanson and Pankiewicz said the changes at the top of the school district were positive lasting impacts of the strike. Dean Henry said he thinks the impacts were more negative. Some parents transferred their kids or moved out of the district. One year after the strike, enrollment had dropped by 600 students, or 5 percent of the total.
“It was a very bad thing for the community,” he said.
Whatever your view point, most people in Marysville still remember the strike. Hanson said even now when she introduces herself, people remember that she was the head of the union at that time.
“Most of the time, they said, 'It wasn’t an easy time, but we understand now what the issue was and we support you in the decision you made,’” Hanson said.
