WOODBURN, Ore. — Woodburn teachers have voted to authorize a possible strike amid ongoing negotiations between the Woodburn School District and the Woodburn Education Association, the union that represents the district's staff.
The vote does not trigger a strike by itself, but it authorizes the union's bargaining team to call for one. If the team calls for a strike, the union is required to give the district at least 10 days' notice. In a news release Thursday, the union said 324 of 329 members voted, and 92% of them were in favor of allowing a potential strike.
The union and the district have been in bargaining since June 2022, according to the union, but remain stuck on several issues including pay, class sizes, special education case loads and available time in the day for tasks like grading and preparing lesson plans.
The union claimed in the news release that 63 teachers have resigned since the start of the current school year. One of the union's bargaining team members, teacher Misha Pfliger, said low staffing levels and high class sizes have made school days feel like "education triage," and argued that the district has resources available to bring down class sizes.
"We see central office Administrators hiring more administrators, giving themselves a 16% one-year pay increase, sitting on $23 million in regular reserve funds, millions more in Federal relief funds, then refuse to invest resources to help students directly in the classroom," teacher and union president Tony Salm added. "What’s the Administration's priority, the central office or the classroom?"
The district reported on March 22 that the union had declared an impasse during the previous contract bargaining session. The district and the union each filed their respective final offers with the Oregon Employment Relations Board the day before.
The earliest possible legal start date for a strike — if the union opted to call for one — would be April 20, according to the district. In a post on its website, the district said class size caps and cost of living adjustments were the "two primary issues" still unresolved.
The district said it offered a 12% total cost of living raise spread across three years, plus yearly step increases, stipends for longevity and bonuses for bilingual and special education staff.
The district argued that it has decreased average class sizes and improved teacher-to-student ratios in recent years, but setting a hard cap would force it to blend grade levels, split up families across schools or hire more teachers at all schools, which it said would be "impractical and not fiscally possible."
The district also pointed a finger at the state, declaring that "At the heart of this conflict is a problem neither WEA nor the District can solve: the State of Oregon systemically and chronically underfunds K-12 education compared to its peer states."
This story has been updated to correct the percentage of union members who voted to authorize a strike.
