Shortly after the final bell of the school week dings at 3:32, take a look outside. Chances are you might see a revolution in progress. For the last several school weeks, many teachers at Ithaca High School have been leaving the buildings strictly according to their contract in protest for a fair contract. These walk-outs are only the last thing in a long series of teacher-administration problems.
I was first approached about this topic several months ago through a cryptic note that led me to an even more cryptic source. There are a lot of players in this game, and not all of them are willing to talk about it in a straightforward manner: the majority of teachers I talked to either did not want to comment or did not want to have any information attributed to them. No one is sure how this conflict will ultimately resolve, and they do not want their words to be used against them.
You may have seen the posters that, over the last couple of months, have peppered themselves across the walls in G and H—and somehow stayed up. They rank the ICSD as 579 out of 667 in teacher pay. Surrounding areas like Newfield, Union Springs, and Newark Valley soar above us, despite IHS being the 53rd best high school in New York State (443rd nationwide) according to US News rankings. To compound the problem, cost of-living adjustments have been made to teacher contracts in the past that account for the rise of health care, inflation, and other things, but during this last round teacher pay did increase, but not to the desired amount. The posters were hung by a “small group of teachers who just felt like some of the information had to get out to the public,” I was told by an anonymous source.
ICSD teachers are currently working under an old, expired contract, since no new contract has been approved. That means a whole mess of issues for teachers, students, and the community.
Frankly, we’re blessed to have some of the teachers we have who continue to work so well under these conditions. Jenny Smith, a Boynton teacher, researched the pay disparity between ICSD and other districts and came to the conclusion that some teachers with equal experience are making $14,000 more elsewhere. I’ve had several teachers tell me that if they moved from this great community to someplace like Union Springs, they’d be paid at least $10,000 more. Some of these are teachers who have been with the school for years, if not decades.
The plan for the future of ICSD teachers is quite ambiguous. They’re currently in negotiation with the administration about teacher pay, but many teachers are anticipating on both sides coming to a standstill. An arbitrator could be forced to be included in the negotiations, listen to both sides, and decide who gets what, but the teachers involved don’t want to leave everything to such a chancy system. “I think there’s enough excitement about this particular period of time that if demands are not met there’s not going to be a lot of caving by the union,” said one teacher. Instead, they’re hoping their walk-outs, protests, and other means of objection will help. Keep in mind that these are the teachers who still choose to stay working as a teachers in Ithaca.
“That’s sort of the expectation: teachers will just stay; we don’t mean anything. The problem is that [the pay problem] is starting to have some real implications,” a social-studies teacher told me at the protest on Route 13 back in November. “You used to put out a job position and get hundreds of applicants. Now we’re getting, like, twenty.” Sometimes, it’s even less than that, according to a teacher on the English hiring committee. Think about the implications of having fewer applicants: one greenhorn teacher might get her facts about world history mixed up but teach quite well to the test. She might be the only one who can teach well to the test. So the district hires her despite her later claims that ziggurats flew over London during a world war and that the Nuremberg Trial was against Jews. “[IHS] will get warm bodies to stand up in front of the class,” the teacher added, “they will. But is that who you want teaching your children?”
Low teacher wages correlate with poor teacher retainment. Out of all the teachers you’ve had in the past few years, how many still work at their school? Many permanent employees aren’t even waiting until the end of the year: Ithaca Teacher Association President Adam Piasecki said that 35 positions have retired or left in the last semester. We’re barely past the halfway mark in the year and the sheer mass of dropouts has left schools scrambling for teachers who will come to a district like ICSD. Last year, 31 teachers resigned, retirees not included. “It’s not healthy to have such high turnover,” I’ve heard from a dozen different mouths.
“I can personally say that I could be making $14,000 more a year if I worked at Union Springs. I’ve had offers to do so and I’ve chosen not to because this is my community. But at some point, people are making different decisions,” the social-studies teacher continues. “It’s a great community to live in, of course, and that’s a part of the reason so many people stay, but people shouldn’t have to pay with that so extremely … That’s embarrassing for a city that claims to be focused on education. And I’m also a taxpayer—we pay really high taxes for education and our teachers are among the lowest-paid. Where is [the money] going to? It doesn’t add up.”
There are more student and teacher advocates on the board members on the school board since the last election, according to teachers, mostly Ann Reichlin, Jen Curley, and Moira Lang.
“We’re not pretending we’re in poverty,” a different social-studies teacher told me outside of Chili’s as cars whizzed by. “Most of us have master’s degrees, we’ve been in school for five years, we are—by all accounts—professionals. But we are disproportionately compensated for our time. For the most part, we are paid to be [at school] from 8:45 to about 3:30. Most of us work 50, 60, 70 hours a week. We do what we do because we love students.” This teacher would later go on to ask that people like him be more fairly compensated for training so hard for the job, working every day, and bringing positive change in terms of community development, social justice, and personal growth.
There are other forms of protest to this problem that have not yet been touched on, but that’s mostly because they are radical. I met with a teacher at IHS who proposed teachers “work-to-rule” as a form of protest. “The whole school district would come crumbling down. There would be chaos! And would it inform people of how much teachers do outside their contractual obligations? Absolutely. But we wouldn’t want to do that; it wouldn’t be fair to our students, even for a short period of time. We are just so desperate some teachers are thinking ‘we should try this.’”
A work-to-rule would mean this: teachers only work for the hours they’re paid to work, ten minutes before and after the school day for students. This means no clubs, no trips, no tutoring, no college recommendations, no coming in early to use equipment, no coming in to talk to teachers or get help on a question. No teachers would grade work out of school hours, meaning they’d assign work they could grade in class or a computer could grade for them, leading to a system that either resembles Mr. Carver’s March Mellow (in which he followed the work-to-rule system for a month) or Mr. Anderson’s AP Language and Composition (in which he only teaches one class and assigns sporadic quizzes)—or a Chromebook-and-Scantron-based class to avoid extra hours for the teacher. That’s before you factor in everything else. Carver is moving towards another March Mellow, with a maximum of 12 hours a week outside of school being devoted to grading or planning, because he claims he cannot handle the amount of work all his classes force on him. He may be the first to adopt such a system, but if his system works, it’s likely others will follow suit—and the issue of pay and teacher contracts will still go unresolved.
Others argue that a salary schedule, or step system, is the right solution for the problem: a definitive table that shows what a teacher would make after their first year, second year, third, etc. One can predict what they would make next year, and a possible pay grade boost come the seventeenth year (as Niagara Falls offers) would incentivise teachers to retain their current position.
An end to negotiations may be close, though it’s hard to tell. The Ithaca Voice recently said that “board member Brad Grainger agreed, saying that contract negotiations are on the ‘verge of agreement” and that he expects them to be wrapped up for this year.’” The standstill “doesn’t mean you’re not appreciated. It just takes time,” Grainger said at a board meeting.
These walk-outs are dozens of teachers’ way of saying “We’re still standing after months of negotiations and arguments. The fatigue has not stopped us.” School board meetings, I’m told, have been surprisingly emotional these last few months—the last thing one would expect. Teachers clearly care about their students, but they also want what they think they deserve. As I spoke to teachers protesting across Route 13, they all told me the same thing to tell the readers: if you want change, make a fuss.
If you’re eligible to vote, make it count in upcoming local elections. Keep bringing it up at home, get your parents or yourself to call or write to school board members, and pressure them into making whatever decision you think is right. That’s what democracy is about, and there’s no better time to learn that than in high school.