As Portland teachers strike hits 7th day, some tensions hit a new high

Portland Teachers Strike

Students in the Russian language immersion program at Kelly Elementary School march across the school's playground on the sixth day of the Portland teachers strike.Sean Meagher/The Oregonian

Tensions and emotions around Portland Public Schools are stretching increasingly thin as the teachers strike hits its seventh day with no immediate end in sight, leaving 44,000 students at risk of a second prolonged educational disruption in the last four years.

Their families are left with little sense of what might happen next. Many say they both unconditionally support their teachers and are also adrift after the sudden halt to the routines and rhythms that anchor daily life.

Communication from both teachers and the school district has been sporadic, leaving families to parse through both official communication and posts on social media to try to game out how the impasse will ever be resolved, given gaping differences over wages, planning time and class sizes.

Meanwhile, over the past two days, some of the pro-teacher union demonstrations around town have turned more pointed and personal. On Thursday, hundreds of demonstrators congregated at the Pearl District condominium tower where Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero lives, circulating flyers calling for a vote of no confidence in his leadership to the accompaniment of a marching band and the strains of “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”

Portland Teachers Strike

A marching band accompanies demonstrators Thursday at a march in the Pearl District in front of Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero's condominium tower.Sami Edge/The Oregonian

Demonstrators spilled into 11th Avenue, blocking traffic and the Portland Streetcar while they cheered for speakers standing in the back of a pickup truck.

“If they’d listened to us a year ago in bargaining we wouldn’t have to work so hard to get their attention now,” Glencoe Elementary fifth grade teacher Rachel Hanes told the crowd. “The top handful of people are stonewalling us. They are dragging this out.”

That followed a Wednesday demonstration during which teachers and their allies made their way inside the closed Oregon Convention Center and — accompanied by Cesar the No-Drama Llama — went in search of board member Andrew Scott, a Metro executive, who was there for a work event at the Metro-owned building. Craig Stroud, the convention center’s director, followed up Thursday with a note to his staff which read in part, “I felt and saw the emotion and weight on the event on many of you … It was scary with a complete feeling of lost control and ability to protect the building and … attendees.”

School district leaders on Thursday informed the Portland Association of Teachers that they planned to file an unfair labor practices complaint. State law prohibits protesting at a school board member’s home or workplace as an attempt to influence negotiations.

Many other gatherings have been wholly peaceful. At Lincoln High Thursday morning, students gathered to paint a mural in support of teachers. Across town at Franklin High, student thespians planned to perform selections from their postponed production of The Little Mermaid.

Far from the rallies Thursday, George Middle School student Jayvionne Jackson, 12, took his pet bulldog, Everest, for a walk to the Little Free Library that sits at the foot of the driveway to his North Portland apartment complex. He emerged with a battered coloring book, its cover torn off but some of the pages untouched, which he said he’d give to his little brother. He said he’s spent the six days of missed school doing homework, cleaning his house, playing board games and waiting to return.

“Our teachers are asking for more money for kids. They also want to go back,” Jayvionne said. “If I could talk to them, I would ask ‘When is the strike going to be over? I want to go back to school.’”

At a neighboring apartment complex, Isabel Siquinia said that her 6 and 7 year old children, students at Sitton Elementary, have been asking every day when they can go back to school.

“I tell them no, not today, there is an emergency at the school, the teachers are protesting,” Siquinia said in Spanish translated to English by Google Translate. She said together they are trying their best to keep up with reading and math.

Roosevelt High student Jonah Connell, 14, was hunched over his phone across from a 7-Eleven in St. Johns, waiting for the Line 75 bus that would take him downtown to join the day’s marches. He was inspired to participate by his teachers, he said, and thinks they deserve higher pay.

If the strike goes on for weeks, he said, “it might impact a lot of people around me. People might get behind on their grades and have to redo classes.”

Post-pandemic recovery in Portland has been halting since children returned to school buildings in fall 2021. The district’s students outperformed state averages on standardized tests this year and last, as would be expected in a district with relatively high incomes and parent education levels. But results were notably less rosy for students of color and those who speak English as a second language.

And chronic absenteeism remains an enormous problem in Portland and statewide; 36% of Portland Public Schools students missed more than three weeks of school last year, putting them statistically at great risk of falling far behind academically, never catching up and getting pushed out of the system entirely.

Across town, at Kelly Elementary in outer Southeast Portland, a group of families in the school’s Russian immersion program gathered Wednesday to passionately argue in favor of the teacher union’s request for smaller class sizes for their students, some of whom have fled war-torn Ukraine and are trying to start a new life in an unfamiliar place.

They said their program has lost teachers or had them reassigned to English-only classrooms in recent years even as Slavic newcomer families sought safe haven in Portland, leaving some students adrift in classes of 30 and shutting other families out of the program for lack of space.

“The teacher doesn’t have enough time for each separate kid, to help them,” said Klare Rakhmatila via a fellow parent’s translation. Her family recently arrived in Portland from Kyrgyzstan and her daughter was first placed in an English-only classroom at Kelly, where she spent most of her first grade year adrift, drawing pictures at the back of the room, her mother said.

In second grade, Rakhmatila managed to get her daughter into the Russian immersion program with the help of fellow parents. Her daughter is making some progress now, she said, but with 29 other classmates all at different academic and behavioral levels, she can see how hard it is to teach and learn.

In the much wealthier Alameda neighborhood in Northeast Portland, the Rev. Erin Martin, pastor of the Fremont United Methodist Church, said she was grateful to offer space at the church to host “strike camps” for children who are out of school. She said the church is also welcoming teachers from the elementary school across the street to store signs and use the restroom.

“Our teachers rose to the occasion at great cost to themselves [during the pandemic],” Martin said. “They have reached a collective point where they are simply not going to say, ‘There is not enough money and that is okay.’”

Other parents said they were frustrated by the snail’s pace of bargaining that’s left children at loose ends and parents juggling work and childcare in an unwelcome flashback to the pandemic spring of 2020.

Howard Snyder, whose two children attend the Chinese immersion program at Woodstock Elementary in Southeast Portland and who is himself a former Hosford Middle School teacher, said he’d like to see teachers get a cost of living increase of at least 6% a year and hoped to see progress on class size and maintenance. But he questioned what he termed the “general impracticality” of some of the union’s other asks.

The union is asking for an 8.5% raise for the contract’s first year, while the district is offering 4.5%.

“The distressing thing to me about this strike is that the gap between PAT and PPS has been and continues to be so large,” he said. “As a parent I want them to come up with a reasonable compromise, but PAT seems to deny fiscal reality.”

Already, students in grades K-8 have missed 31.5 hours of school, putting them below the mandatory minimum number of hours required by the state Department of Education, school district officials say. High schoolers have missed 35.5 hours of schools, putting seniors below the minimums and the rest of their schoolmates very close.

Little information emerged Thursday from either side about bargaining progress, though in their Wednesday night update to members, teachers said they were “underwhelmed” by proposals from the district on special education and student supports/discipline/safety issues.

The Oregonian/OregonLive requested to speak with budget analysts from the Department of Administrative Services who have been working with both sides to come to agreement on how much funding is actually available to fulfill the teachers’ requests.

But a spokesperson for DAS said its CFO, Kate Nass, was not available for an interview because “she is serving as a resource to both sides as directed by the governor on Tuesday.”

Franklin High special education teacher Alexis Asare, who attended the rally outside Guerrero’s home, said it felt good to demonstrate in the affluent Pearl District.

“I want to be valued as a teacher and an educator,” she said. “I feel like we’re not trusted for saying we don’t have safe working conditions for our students. We don’t have enough money to live in the communities that we serve.”

— Julia Silverman, @jrlsilverman, jsilverman@oregonian.com

— Sami Edge, @sedge, sedge@oregonian.com

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