KEA rally draws more than 1,000 teachers to road in front of Kent district offices

They lined the street several rows deep, waving signs, chanting and shouting to passing vehicles.

They got plenty of honks in return.

The striking teachers of the Kent School District put on a show of force Friday, with a picket line of about 1,400 that stretched down both sides of 256th Street, near the Kent school administration campus.

“Our members are strong and resolute,” said Lisa Brackin-Johnson, president of the Kent Education Association, the teachers’ union, surrounded by the mob of fellow picketers that morning.

Watching as her colleagues waved signs that blended into a mass of moving KEA slogans, she added, “We know what we’re standing for is right.”

It’s a combination of issues regarding class sizes, time and compensation that have put the union and school district on a collision course.

When negotiations for a new teachers’ contract broke down between the district and union earlier this month, the district declared an impasse. That declaration set into motion a state mediator, who came down to broker discussions between the two beginning Aug. 19.

But in spite of reaching agreement on some items, the two sides were still unable to find enough common ground, culminating in a strike vote Aug. 26 by KEA. A whopping 86.4 percent of the 1,500 teachers in attendance voted to strike.

While teachers rallied at their own buildings most of Thursday, on Friday they gathered at district headquarters, where another round of negotiations was starting.

Brackin-Johnson said the point was to send a clear message to the district.

“That we are here as one voice,” she said. “They (the contract issues) affect every single one of us.”

Mill Creek Middle School teacher P.J. Frame was doing his part at the rally, waving a KEA sign. Like the majority of his colleagues, he’d voted in favor of a strike.

His biggest issue, Frame said, was not so much pay but the quantity of time teachers have to spend in meetings, away from the classroom. That makes working with his students, and managing other aspects of his teaching time, increasingly complex.

“I already work at home,” Frame said, of taking class assignments and other work-related projects to do in his time outside of the classroom. He balances those with the needs of his own family, including three children.

Kent is the third district in which Frame has worked as a teacher, and he said from the day he started, he was surprised at how much time was devoted to meetings.

“Sometimes we’re planning what our next meeting is going to be about,” he said, of what they’ll discuss.

Cutting down on the quantity of gatherings, Frame said, would be a “cost-free change” for the district to implement.

As to the strike, Frame said it was not something he relished doing.

“We want to go back to work,” he said.

Penny Ackerson, a first-grade teacher at Daniel Elementary, said class sizes were a major issue for her.

“I want classes smaller, so that I can spend more time with individual students,” she quipped.

A teacher for about 30 years in the Kent School District, Ackerson said she voted for her first-ever strike because she’d had enough.

“Each time we turn around, we feel like something is being taken from us,” she said.

In her own case, Ackerson said she sees class sizes running between 24 and 28 students. What she’d like to see, she said, are classes in the low 20s.

“That’s more reasonably sized,” she said.

The other issue, related to class sizes, she said, is instructional support.

“I had an assistant who left, and to save money, there was no replacement. It was just put off,” she said.

The KEA has tentatively scheduled another vote for Sunday at Kentlake High School, although it will occur only if there is something contract-wise that can be voted on, from the ongoing district-union negotiations.

“We know we’re ready, if there’s something on the table to vote on,” Ackerson said.