Number Crunchers Often Target Support Staff For Pay Cuts
Jeanne Middleton has lived in Brighton, Illinois, for 22 years. For the last seven, she has worked with Southwestern Community Unit School District Number 9 as a bus driver, lunchroom monitor, and utility worker – all at once. Combined, the jobs provide Middleton with enough work hours to qualify her for health insurance and other benefits.
“It’s challenging,” says Middleton, president of the Southwestern Education Support Professionals Association (SWESPA). “You get use to switching from one setting to the next.”
Like so many ESPs in the district, Middleton lives, shops, votes, and worships in the same school district where she works. She spends time with neighbors whose children are among those she drives to and from school.
“I graduated from Alton High School about 15 miles from where we live now,” she says.
Many of SWESPA’s 60 members are also homegrown. They either attended the schools where they now work, have children attending these schools, or have a spouse who was born and raised in this rural farming community. They are rooted.
Yet, in the eyes of the superintendent and school board members, they are expendable. Since June, district ESPs have been working on an expired contract. After meeting throughout the summer, once under the supervision of a federal mediator, SWESPA members overwhelmingly rejected a school district proposal for a two-year Number Crunchers Often Target Support Staff For Pay Cuts - NEA Today:
