Four Seattle Teachers Declare: “We Refuse to Give the Tests”
By Anthony Cody and Susan DuFresne.
Four Seattle area teachers who got to know one another in 2011, when they all attended the Save Our Schools march in Washington, DC, stood before the Renton Board of Education and read “statements of professional conscience” in which they pledged their refusal to administer standardized tests to their students. Their names are Julianna Kreuger Dauble, Judy Dotson, Susan DuFresne and Becca Ritchie.
Renton, Washington, is just south of Seattle. The Renton School District has 15,000 students and a five member elected school board. The board met on the evening of Wednesday, Jan. 28, in the Sierra Heights Elementary School cafeteria. Teacher Susan DuFresne provided me with a firsthand description of the night’s events.
The process began with a simple group post on Facebook started by Becca Ritchie, saying that she wanted to write a letter and wanted feedback. That spark inspired all of us to organize around this issue.We arrived at Sierra Heights Elementary School early after three of us had been collaborating working on her speech is over the course of two weeks. Julianna teaches there, so we gathered in her classroom to practice. Jeb Binns, president of the Rainier UniServ Council, joined us to time us and offer feedback. Judy Dotson decided to join us just a few days before the board meeting so she worked on her speech for a very short time. We lined up other teachers at Julianna’s school to read from the list of objections that went beyond the boards’ three-minute allocation for each of us to speak. We also had other teachers who though they did not submit of letters a professional conscience, spoke passionately about toxic testing right after we spoke.We entered the cafeteria at Sierra Heights elementary, which is Julianas school where the school board meeting was being held last night. We signed up as a group so that our names would be called in a stacked order after strategizing how we wanted to deliver our speeches.The gym was packed full as there were teachers there being honored for receiving their national board certification, and students who were going to deliver speeches about studying Martin Luther King, which framed our entire message for us by serendipity. This also meant that there were parents in the crowd ready to hear their children, but who also ended up hearing our speeches.As we were waiting for our place on the agenda when it was time allotted for the public to share comments to the board our friends from the Washington Badass Teachers Association began filing in in solidarity. Other teachers from Julianna’sFour Seattle Teachers Declare: “We Refuse to Give the Tests” - Living in Dialogue:
Susan DuFresne: My Statement of Professional Conscience
