Teachers strike Newton, MA

Schools are closed since including Friday Jan 19. The involved parties cannot agree on a new contract for the teachers.  In fact, they can only agree on two things: 1. The kids should be back in school asap. 2. The other party can end the strike right now. In the meanwhile, high-school kids are at home playing Need for speed: Unbound, and smoking pot, thank goodness we have the stores here in Newton. Residents are kept on the edge, bombarded with emails offering ray of hopes, like “we have one goal today: to send the kids back to school tomorrow” or “closest we’ve ever been” followed by “Schools closed tomorrow, strike continues” the evening before.  After a lot of tension, now it’s the new normal and it’s starting to feel like the COVID-19 closure. People talk about “rebuilding community” when/if this is resolved.  But there is no strong community here.  If there was one, staff and parents would step in and open the schools themselves.  They would cook, clean, and teach (no shortage of teachers in town).

During my high-school at the Liceo Scientifico Borromini (now vanished) in Rome, at some point the students “took over the building.” This was a significant experience of my childhood. I was there every day, mostly playing poker and wandering around previously inaccessible rooms, but also teaching a math class (my first couple of years in high school were disastrous, I almost failed, but for inexplicable reasons towards the end I improved and became sort of well known in math, even though the teacher didn’t think much of me, and besides computer programming I had little skills beyond doing fast and correctly what they were teaching us). I would be happy to volunteer to cook, and teach in Newton; I’ll mop too.

Of course, this is much bigger than just a local feud. There are big political forces here clashing against each other. NEA (the country’s largest union labor) President Becky Pringle is speaking this morning in support of Newton educators because this reflects “what all students and educators in public schools across the country deserve.” Read this.