I recently had the pleasure of speaking with the president of the Ithaca Teachers Association (ITA) Kathryn Cernera. For more than twenty years, she taught seventh grade English at DeWitt Middle School. This is her first year not working in the classroom, but instead full-time with the union. She started her work with the ITA by running its political action committee, working on political and legislative work on behalf of the ITA’s membership. She then served as Vice President of the association for about eight years before taking on the role of President in July 2023. In this interview, we discussed…
Ace Dufresne ‘26: What is the Ithaca Teachers Association and why is it important?
Kathryn Cernera: The Ithaca Teachers Association is a union. And as a union, we represent and advocate for over six hundred educators in our school district. We really just work with the people who are in teaching roles. There are different unions for teacher’s aides, teacher’s assistants, substitutes, etc.
For me, a union is really important because it gives us the right to set what we want our work to look like. The union affords us the teacher’s contract, which is probably one of the most important things that it does. It’s like one-hundred-fifty pages that outline what can and can’t be done, how we get paid, how we get compensated for overtime, how our schedules get allotted, how long we get to eat lunch and where we get to eat it, where we go to the bathroom. Every single thing that’s the right of all teachers is outlined by that. Because we have the union, it means that every teacher gets the same things, and your conditions aren’t made up based on your relationship with the principal or where you work or things like that.
AD: What’s it like to work as President of the ITA? What do you do and what is your favorite part of the role?
KC: I’ve been working with the ITA for a really long time, but this is the first time that just working for the ITA has been my full-time job, which is really wonderful because before, I was trying to do a lot of good work to help support our teachers while also working a full-time job teaching young people, so for me, having that opportunity to do this full-time is very exciting.
A lot of my day-to-day stuff is handling little problems for people or answering little questions—well, little or big—questions like, “Hey I’m about to have a baby, how is that going to work for my job?” or “Hey I haven’t had a lunch in three weeks, how do I fill out that timesheet to make sure that I get paid for it?” So there’s a lot of that little stuff in the day-to-day, but then there is also the bigger picture of the union working together to make ICSD the best place it can possibly be for ourselves, knowing that if it’s good for us it’s going to be good for our students as well. Doing that kind of organizing work is what has kept me doing union work for as long as I’ve been doing it.
The thing that I’m most excited about right now is that we are going to be negotiating our contract next year. We have spent the entire year this year running what we call the Build a Better Contract campaign, where we have been working with a team of twenty-five teachers across every single school and every single area, who have been meeting with the people who have similar jobs to them and asking, “What do we need from our next contract negotiation?” They’ve all come back together and right now—it’s like the biggest group project in the world—we have a list of 150 things that people say that they want. Now we’re all working together as a team to figure out, “Which of these are the ones that we’re really going to fight for?” and “Which of these are going to be the easy ones to win? and which of these are going to take work?” Doing that level of work and trying with everything that we can to make sure that we’re talking to every single member and asking, “What do you need? Let’s fight for it” has been the goal. It’s been really joyful to see people getting excited about that process.
AD: Considering the upcoming teacher contract, are there any main goals the ITA is hoping to achieve moving forward?
KC: It’s a little too early to be specific on them because we’re still in the process of making sure that everyone helps us align our priorities. I feel however very confident that those priorities will line up in a way that starts to address that big gap between what we’re expected to do, the time that we have to do it, and the amount of money that we’re compensated to do it.
AD: What are the main difficulties that teachers in ICSD face?
KC: A lot of it comes down to the fact that we have really, really demanding jobs. When you think of the work of a teacher, it’s easy to see that being in a classroom with kids and delivering lessons is the work of a teacher, but then, doing that and then supporting the students who are there has so much behind-the-scenes work that needs to be done to make that happen really well. The amount of time that we have to do all the behind-the-scenes work is really, really limited.
I think that a lot of the struggles come down to the issue that teachers are generally being asked to do a really huge job with very few resources to actually make that job happen. In a lot of ways, we’re being asked to do the impossible every single day and it’s just kind of expected that we’ll do it and really, almost all the time, we just do it. We make magic happen every day and kind of bend time, but there are very few teachers who are not working many, many hours into the evening and giving up an entire day over the weekend to plan lessons, and grade, and find resources for new lessons, and reach out to families—that piece is probably the most challenging aspect of being a teacher.
AD: How do you see the well-being of ICSD’s teachers relating to the well-being of ICSD as a whole?
KC: We very proudly and very consistently at the ITA use the motto that teacher working conditions are student learning conditions. That speaks to the fact that the entire ICSD works better if the adults who do the work are being well-taken care of: being well-cared for, being given what they need to do the work that they need to do, the time that they need to do that work in, and the money that is respectable for the job that they do. The best investment we can make as ICSD is in the people doing the work because we show up every day, investing everything we have into the students who we serve and the families who we support by doing that work. Really investing in us is, in my opinion, the best way to strengthen everything that we do.
AD: Is there something you wish the ICSD community understood better about the role, the importance, and the work that our teachers do?
KC: I think that people know that teaching is hard, but I don’t think they understand that teaching is hard. Conceptually people are like “oh, I could never be a teacher” and a lot of that is from the experience of the student. But when you’re a student, you really only experience that product, you don’t see all of the behind-the-scenes work. It’s like when you go to see an amazing play, you see that finished product, you don’t see all the hours and hours of difficult rehearsals or even what’s going on backstage. “Yeah, we know it’s hard, but we don’t understand how hard it is” is something that I think in general people don’t understand.
A personal pet peeve of mine is the myth that “oh, teachers get all summer off, your job is so easy, you get these vacations, you get these summers off” and things like that. One of the things that people don’t realize is that we’re actually ten-month-employees, we’re not twelve-month-employees. Those two months in the summer, we are not being paid, we are not actually working, and we are technically unemployed but can’t apply for unemployment because we have a job to come back to when school is back in session. That’s a thing that people just don’t know about. So when I hear people say “oh, teachers get summer off, what are you complaining about?” I’m like, well, I’m complaining about not having a job.
AD: Is there anything else that you’d like readers to know?
KC: Thinking about who the audience of The Tattler is, I want readers to know just how much passion, care, and love is in this group of people who show up every day and run our schools. It’s really hard work, and we love that hard work, and we show up every day, despite all the challenges, because we love our students and we love our jobs and we love what we do and we love helping young people to grow and learn and live awesome lives. Everybody is doing an amazing job of that, every single day.