I’ve never campaigned to be a delegate to the IEA Representative Assembly before, although I have been a delegate for all but one of the last twenty or so.
My old local, the Park Ridge Education Association, could send five delegates. And frankly it was good if most years we had five people willing to spend three days in a large hotel convention room.
Some years I had to beg my overworked colleagues to go.
Retired members must run state-wide and the voting is by snail-mail.
Last year somebody in the Springfield headquarters of IEA misplaced the paperwork shifting my membership from active to retired. I couldn’t run for one of the retired delegate slots.
But not this year.
And since I decided to run for one of the 18 delegate positions, I said to Anne, “Nobody ever runs saying what they stand for.” Union elections are always between someone who is for the kids running against someone who is for the future.
I’m running for our pensions. Unapologetically for our pensions. No concessions or freezes on our COLAs.
I’m running against collaboration with corporate school reform – where our union leadership, both hired and elected, agree to phony accountability reforms like PERA and Senate Bill 7.
I want leadership that stands with us. Not with the phony reformers like Stand for Children’s Jonah Edelman.
I was a delegate to an IEA RA shortly after IEA Executive Director Audrey Soglin drafted the law that tied teacher evaluation to individual student growth measures and worked with Edelman to draft Senate Bill 7. SB7 took away seniority and tenure rights and tried to make it harder for Chicago teachers to strike. Audrey was making a report to an IEA RA.
Knowing how things work, halfway through her report I went to the microphone to ask her some questions when she was done.
But former IEA President Ken Swanson (who is also running as a retired delegate) was chairing the session and he would not call on me.
He claimed later he didn’t see me.
Some of you know the story: That night I stopped at a local Target and bought the ugliest, brightest colored orange sweater I could find. I decided then that no leader of the IEA could ever again claim they didn’t see or hear me.
Eventually I did get to ask Executive Director Audrey Soglin my question. It concerned the problems for locals in bargaining what was best for teachers and students as a result of what she had done enacting PERA and SB7.
“It will be a challenge,” she answered.
Boy. That sure has been true.
