Issue link: http://educator.cta.org/i/1480924
"Our fight wasn't just about being comparable in the county, it was about starting the year without teachers in the classroom," Wilson says. "It was a crisis for our students." As SEA members organized, they reached out to a neigh- boring local association at a small, one-school district to share resources and collaborate on the low wages impacting educa- tors. e call to Mountain Teachers Association (MTA) would turn out to be invaluable for SEA and helped spark a growing movement to improve teaching and learning conditions for all Santa Cruz County students and educators. "Joining together is the best way we're going to make this bet- ter for all of us," says D-R Martin, third grade teacher and SEA president. "e power of us is real." Eight-member local sets the stage for change Mountain Elementary School is nestled in the redwoods on a two-lane road that winds through the Santa Cruz Moun- tains. The only school in the semi-rural district, it has about 150 students, one class per grade and eight teachers — all members of MTA. Kim Dudley has taught kindergarten there for 18 years, serving for the last decade as MTA president or co-president. She says the high-performing school has long had a "culture of scarcity," where teachers were overworked and told that small schools can't possibly offer the pay that larger school districts do. After years of being told "there's no money" and being misled by the former superintendent during the last bargain, Dudley dove into the district's budget early this year, analyzing data and developing MTA's contract proposal. With CTA staff helping to crunch the data, she says they had some "a-ha" moments that showed just how underpaid they were. "I had to put together an air-tight case," says Dudley, explain- ing that the district had a 50 percent reserve. " We needed to transform the narrative. ey were saving for the rainy day, and we needed them to understand the storm was here. Unequivo- cally, teachers and staff were going to leave." What resulted was an 83-page contract proposal that told the story of what it meant to be an educator at Mountain and included data-thick sections on staffing shortages and compen- sation comparisons, as well as a collective resume detailing the qualifications and experience of the MTA educators. "We wanted to say, 'these are the people who you are going to lose' and I was one of the people who was going to leave," Dudley says. "en a few weeks later, Soquel did it — and honestly, they did it better." In Soquel, the negotiations team worked together using MTA's proposal as a template to create SEA's document, which included similar number-filled charts, colorful graphs showing comparisons with other districts and a collective CV outlining their combined 1,365 years of teaching experience. Educators from the two locals had started working together during the early days of the pandemic, organizing with the seven other CTA chapters (and two California Federation of Teachers locals) in Santa Cruz County to advocate for health and safety measures. Now they were collaborating to raise educator salaries and sparking a movement across Santa Cruz. "It felt like we were doing something extremely important and needed," says Barratt. Mountain educators escalated their actions slowly, and when parents joined in with them, the school board finally started to listen. MTA was able to secure better pay for their unrepresented education support professional colleagues while also winning Gordon Barratt, Ann Wilson and D-R Martin of Soquel Education Association (SEA), which won a much-needed raise, guaranteed prep time and reduced class sizes. Educators thanked parents and the community for their support after the major victory for Soquel teachers and students. 28 cta.org Feature