Statement to the Iowa City Community School District Board

Thank you for the opportunity to speak this evening, and for the hard and unglamorous work that you all do as school board members. My name is Laura Crossett, and I’m a 1988 graduate of Lincoln Elementary, a 1994 graduate of West High School, and a librarian at the Coralville Public Library. I live in Iowa City, and my son attends kindergarten at Mark Twain Elementary.

Every morning when we get to school he goes over and rings the buzzer and says “Hi, it’s me, Peter,” and every morning, Whitney Wessling, the amazing secretary at Twain says “Hello, Peter.” He’s an anxious kid, and this is one ritual that helps him know it’s okay to go into school every day.

I have seen Whitney show that same level of individual care for all the students at Twain. In the midst of handling phone calls and incoming messages from parents, teachers, and staff, she still knows which kids might not have gotten breakfast if they’re late, and she always knows who needs a hug.

Secretaries, janitors, physical plant workers, groundskeepers, and food service workers aren’t just automatons making a machine work: they are human beings doing difficult, demanding, essential work for which they are rarely recognized, and as such they deserve a say not only in their wages but also in the conditions of their employment, including sick leave, vacation, grievance procedures, and all the other so-called “permissive” topics in collective bargaining agreements — topics that have historically been bargained in good faith for the past 40 years.

Saturday you released a statement noting that “the board and administrative team’s intent to protect and preserve prohibited and permissive items was not conveyed clearly” in meeting with the secretaries’ union. I would call that a drastic understatement: a document that reads “[t]he District proposes to remove the following articles from the negotiated agreement: payroll deductions, union rights, employee hours, seniority, discipline and discharge, sick leave, leaves of absence, vacation, health provisions, safety provisions, grievance procedures, wages and salaries” could hardly be clearer in its intent to strip these employees of everything but a pennies per hour pay raise.

You have apologized for your error. I hope that means you plan to return to the bargaining table ready and willing to include those items in the next collective bargaining agreement and that you will soon come to the table with the janitors’ and food service workers’ unions with that same good faith. The people who make our schools run deserve no less.

4 Replies to “Statement to the Iowa City Community School District Board”

  1. Thank you for sharing this and for standing up for these unsung heroes of our schools. I am always amazed by the dedication of the support staff at Reed’s elementary school. I am not a frequent visitor to the school with my work schedule, but every time I am there, they know who my child is and which class he’s in. They say hi to my son by name every day. We don’t have school nurses (just one for the whole district), so they are the ones who have dealt with my son’s allergic reactions and other injuries. They are AMAZING and absolutely should be seen as just as critical to the educational mission as their colleagues in the classrooms.

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