On Jan. 22, the snow was knee-deep and still falling when the parent of a student at the Galtier Community School in the Midway neighborhood loaded a sled with food and pulled it to the students and staff who were waiting for a bus at their elementary school.
The school was safe and warm. Teachers and education-support professionals stayed with their students, even as the staff’s own families traveled home through the storm. Galtier is a tight-knit community. The teachers know every parent and student, and the parents get to know the teachers because the teachers’ contract gives the community some say in keeping down class sizes.
District administrators tried to close Galtier in 2016, but the Galtier community fought to keep it open. The struggle to save their school, and run it with a laser focus on students, created the relationships that led a parent to pull a sled through a blizzard, and a staff willing to stay deep into the night.
The St. Paul Federation of Teachers, or SPFT, wants to expand the Galtier experience to more neighborhoods through the employment contract we’re now negotiating with the administration.
Imagine sending your children to schools that guaranteed the personal attention and resources they needed to succeed, regardless of their home neighborhood or the abilities they were born with. That’s the dream of our union and the parents who have partnered with us. We’re all working toward the same goal.
The goal line looks different in different schools. At LEAP High School, highly trained teachers and education-support staff work with small classes of newcomer and refugee students. Teachers give students customized lessons as students earn credits toward a high school diploma. The success LEAP educators and students have achieved together is inspiring and should be a model for districts around the country.
At the Farnsworth Aerospace Upper Campus, a magnet school for grades 5 through 8, Cultural Specialist Jim Yang and Program Coordinator for Restorative Practices Shawn Davenport are creating an environment in which students, teachers and administrators can talk honestly through disputes. They know open communication, a hallmark of restorative practices, is the first step toward reforming a national school culture that has been far too quick to suspend students, especially children of color. Jim, Shawn and other restorative practice trainers are improving the learning environments in every school they touch.
At Galtier, LEAP, Farnsworth and many other schools in our district, great things happen every day, but there’s still work to be done. Our district doesn’t have enough staff for all our English learners, students with special needs or students struggling with mental illness. The fresh thinking of restorative practices still isn’t in every school. And many teachers continue to have too many students to provide the one-on-one attention everyone agrees is best.
A new contract with the district administration can’t solve every challenge, of course. There are powerful and wealthy people who want to hoard the dream schools for their own children. Their lobbyists will continue to manipulate the tax code at the Capitol to deny the rest of us the resources to meet the needs of all our students. We can overcome those opponents on Election Day this fall, but other challenges are closer.
We have asked the district administration to join with us to find additional revenue for our schools, to make the improvements we can afford and find creative ways to redirect existing resources toward supporting students. Unfortunately, there has been very little movement in the past five months. In fact, district negotiators have even proposed eliminating class-size limits in 29 of our elementary schools and an unspecified number of middle and high schools.
This is why SPFT members voted Wednesday on whether to strike. In a transparent and inclusionary process, educators from across the city came together in a central location to cast their ballots.
No one wants a strike, and the SPFT is committed to working toward a settlement in order to avoid one. Our hope is that the district administrators will reconsider and start working with educators to grow the good things already happening in our district so they can be shared with everyone. If St. Paul parents will walk through a snowstorm for us, the least we can do is fight for the schools our students deserve.
Nick Faber is a National Board Certified elementary science teacher and president of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers.
