It’s official: after a strike that lasted more than three weeks, canceled 11 school days, and was the last leg of nearly a year of bargaining between the Portland Association of Teachers and Portland Public Schools — teachers have a new contract.
PAT represents thousands of educators in Oregon’s largest school district, serving about 44,000 students. It’s the largest union in the district, and is made up of classroom and special education teachers, coaches, counselors, speech-language pathologists and more.
It’s common for unions to reach for the stars and districts to lowball their offers. In the end, they typically meet in the middle. But in Portland, it was a harder fight to reach that point.
Throughout mediation and the strike, the two sides regularly disagreed on core facts about what was financially and logistically feasible.
Gov. Tina Kotek brought in the state’s chief financial officer, Kate Nass, to get the two on the same page regarding finances, and officials from the Oregon Department of Education pored over the district’s budget documents as well. It took marathon conversations among school board members, top district officials and union leaders to reach a deal on issues ranging from class sizes to compensation.
In the last moments of the teacher strike that brought her fraying school district to its knees in November, Frankie Silverstein, a Franklin High sophomore who represents students on the board of Portland Public Schools, had some choice words for all the adults in the room.
“There is no winning, because students have been losing this whole time,” she said on Tuesday, just before board members unanimously ratified a new contract with the teachers union. The hard-fought deal will give educators a 14.4% compounded cost of living adjustment over three years and require the district to spend down its savings and make more than $100 million in cuts, absent a new source of funding.