PORTLAND, Ore. — Portland schools will remain closed through at least the weekend as a historic first-ever teachers strike unfolds, Portland Public Schools confirmed Wednesday afternoon. The closure will delay report cards, officials said.
Amid strained eleventh-hour contract negotiations with the district, the Portland Association of Teachers announced Tuesday night that teachers would go on strike the next day, shutting down the district's 81 schools and impacting about 45,000 students.
Teachers hit the picket lines around schools across Portland on Wednesday morning, calling for the district to meet their demands on pay, class sizes and prep time, among other major sticking points.
PPS has said that families can expect a text and email from the district at 7 p.m. each night to update them on whether classes will resume the next day. However, there were no bargaining sessions scheduled for Wednesday, so the district confirmed early that schools will be closed through Thursday.
Friday is a previously scheduled planning day for teachers, so the district had already planned for no classes — guaranteeing that schools will remain closed through at least the end of the week.
In a letter sent to the union on Wednesday, PPS leveraged statements from Gov. Tina Kotek and the Portland Metro Chamber of Commerce urging both sides to stay at the bargaining table and avert a strike.
"We understand that we have significant disagreements on critical issues. We can only bridge these and reach agreement through dialogue, cooperation, and compromise at the table, not on the sidewalk," Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero and the district's bargaining team wrote.
But as Wednesday's negotiations failed to make any headway toward an agreement, PAT responded with a terse letter countering that the district has not taken teachers' demands seriously, dooming negotiations.
"If what we saw in your package was an actual engagement on the issues that matter to our members and community, we could have potentially arrived at a resolution and avoided a work action," the union's letter said. "This proposal makes it loud and clear: PPS does not want to engage in a bargaining process, one that began in January 2023."
Superintendent Guerrero held a press conference Wednesday morning to address the strike. He repeated an assertion that the district has made previously — that the state of Oregon does not provide them with adequate funding, which prevents them from conceivably meeting the union's demands.
Since 2020, Guerrero said, the district's revenue has gone up by 9% while inflation has spiked 18%. The state's funding doesn't keep pace with a state commission's recommendations in the latest Quality Education Model.
"Let's sit with that for a moment," Guerrero said. "The state of Oregon is not funding what they themselves have identified as a quality education for Oregon students. And here we are, at the district level, wanting to pay our educators a quality education salary and give our students a quality educational experience, but without a quality education level of funding."
But Guerrero also pointed a finger at the Portland Association of Teachers' demands, which he portrayed as unreasonable under the circumstances.
"We're not prepared to accept $370 million of more new spending and the hundreds of millions of dollars of cuts it would require," Guerrero said. "Those cuts are less employees potentially, those cuts would mean higher class sizes potentially, those cuts could mean reduced services to our students."
Outside of Roosevelt High School, the PAT held an energetic rally Wednesday to mark the beginning of the strike.
"We demand that (PPS) create a budget that diverts resources from the central office to our schools," said Angela Bonilla, PAT president. "We demand that they restore special education positions, restore classroom educators, we demand that they provide educators with what we need to do well by our students. We demand that they believe the educators they employ when we tell them that they need to give our kids the schools that they deserve."
In attendance at the rally was Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, which is the largest labor union in the U.S. at roughly 3 million members. Pringle said that teachers around the country are watching to see what happens in Portland.
"I can tell you that our Portland teachers are fighting so hard to make sure that every single one of their schools is a great public school — and they know what that takes," Pringle said. "It takes smaller class sizes, it takes more mental health professionals. It takes making sure that they cannot only attract but retain qualified and certified teachers ... so they have to pay a professional salary and they have to respect our teachers as professionals to make teaching and learning decisions for the students.
"All of these reasons are you see teachers all over Portland hitting the streets and demanding better for their students, demanding better for the schools, and demanding better for the people who have dedicated their lives to educating Portland students."