PORTLAND, Ore. — Educators with Portland Public Schools walked off the job Wednesday morning after the district and the Portland Association of Teachers failed to reach a last-minute contract deal Tuesday night. Classes were canceled Wednesday as teachers embarked on the first teachers strike in PPS history.
"Portland educators were hopeful we could reach an agreement with the district that meets the needs of students and educators, so we could be in school with our students Wednesday morning," said Samara Bockelman, school counselor at Beaumont Middle School and PAT bargaining team member, on Tuesday night. "Unfortunately, after more than 12 months of bargaining, district leaders weren’t willing to make the investments necessary to ensure every Portland student has the resources they need to thrive."
Teachers set up picket lines at various schools Wednesday morning. Union representatives said there will be no bargaining Wednesday, which points to the likelihood that classes will be canceled again Thursday.
At around 6:45 p.m. Tuesday, the school district began notifying families that schools would be closed Wednesday. In a brief statement, PPS said they anticipated that schools would be closed Thursday as well, but they would "alert families tomorrow morning."
The district said parents can expect a text and email from the district by 7 p.m. each night announcing whether school will be open the following day for as long as the strike continues. There will be no such email on Thursday night, the district noted, because schools are already scheduled to be closed on Friday for a teacher planning and professional development day.
District officials held a news conference Tuesday afternoon to provide an update on mediation progress. Renard Adams, chief of research, assessment and accountability at PPS, said the district had formally asked the PAT bargaining team to not strike Wednesday, arguing that it would be detrimental to students and exacerbate the negative impacts of previous pandemic-related school closures.
Adams also said the district had prepared a new contract offer over the previous 24 hours that matched the PAT proposal language for elementary educators in some areas, but said the district did not move on compensation in the new offer because "we have moved four times to date."
The district's current proposal already puts it in the position of having to make cuts in the coming years, he added, and he said the union's proposed class size limits and planning time standards would force the district to hire another 500 teachers at a time when enrollment is declining.
The mediator sent the proposal to the union less than an hour before Tuesday afternoon's news conference, he said, so the district was waiting to see if the union would respond and continue bargaining into the late afternoon.
The PAT bargaining team sent a letter to PPS later Tuesday in response to the most recent proposal that accused the district of engaging "in superficial dialogue and the pretense of collaboration." In the letter, the PAT said the strike would end once "management acknowledges and commits to take action upon the need to change the untenable status quo that educators and students have been living with for too long." Union representatives said the most recent proposal from PPS was worse than previous proposals.
The teachers' biggest sticking points are pay, class sizes and prep time. PPS asserted in its Tuesday afternoon email that there had been "little progress" in the final mediation session before the strike and that the two sides remain more than $220 million apart in their latest contract proposals. Union officials have disputed the size of that gap in recent days.
The district previously stated that it does not have enough substitutes to cover for the roughly 4,000 unionized staff with PAT and would be forced to close all of its 81 schools for the duration of a strike, including canceling most extracurricular activities other than varsity sports, impacting about 45,000 students, as well as their parents, who have been scrambling to line up day care options.
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