There is a reason school board seats are nonpartisan; to keep politics out of the classroom. Savvy politicians like Democratic Party Chair Jeff Rogers know that there is nothing better than classrooms and the kiddies to generate political capital and rally the troops.
Jeff Rogers is in need of a little political capital as more and more Democrats reject him and the choices he has made this past year to marginalize good men like Joe Flores while taking away party members’ choices. So once again he is trying to use the kids of TUSD to raise some chits.
Without telling them beforehand so that they could come before the Pima Democrats and defend their non-political decisions, Rogers arranged for the dems to vote to condemn the votes of TUSD Governing Board members Dr. Mark Stegeman and Miguel Cuevas to impose contract language on the unions.
Yeah Jeff, but never before has TEA been so ineffective. Rather than focusing their efforts on saving teachers’ jobs they have been busy saving Ethnic Studies. Rather than focusing their addresses before the School Board on the incessant hiring of administrators they’ve been busy trying to save the jobs of a handful of MAS teachers who don’t know the difference between education and indoctrination.
The fact is that the TUSD Governing Board continues to allow the Tucson Education Association a seat at the bargaining table despite the fact they no longer qualify as the exclusive bargaining agent for the members of that bargaining unit. Whenever a union no longer represents at least half the members of the unit they should lose their status as bargaining agent. Because of its knee-jerk support for identity politics and Raza Studies and its failure to represent the economic interests of the overwhelming majority of the bargaining unit, more than half the members of TEA’s bargaining unit do not belong to the union. In virtually any other school district they’d be tossed out on their ears instead of being offered a seat at the table. Despite this, Stegeman and Cuevas are being condemned as anti-union. That spin is hypocritical politics at its worst.
In a story by Mari Herreras of the Tucson Weekly, Rogers said, “We condemned what they did, but not them personally. We think it is important that if we back a Democratic candidate and labor backs them, then unilaterally opposing a contract as they did was wrong. It has never been done before.”
The contract they opposed was for AFSCME, a union that represents non-teaching employees of TUSD. The more money that goes to AFSCME the less that is available for the classroom. TUSD already has the WORST record of any large district in the state in terms of putting dollars into the classroom. Only 53% of TUSD’s budget is spent in actually educating students. The rest is spent to provide jobs for people who are politically connected to Pima Democrats. The parents of Tucson would be up in arms if the Daily Star fairly reported on the context of the decision not to give AFSCME what they wanted.
If the leadership of TEA spent so little time on the matter of their negotiations and contracts why should Cuevas and Stegeman? If the leaders of AFSCME are only about themselves and not about the kids why should the TUSD Governing Board bend over for them?
At the Governing Board takeover in April, Rogers told one Latina that she better get out of the way because she was going to be run over by the train of transformation that was coming in the form of angry students. It is clear that he is counting on the political classrooms of MAS to provide him with angry members to support the party and its future candidates. Most democrats reject that use of the classroom and the kiddies.