Oklahoma, Kentucky teachers shut schools over pay, pensions

OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) - Oklahoma teachers walked off the job on Monday, closing schools statewide and surrounding the Capitol to demand pay raises and more funding for a school system reeling from a decade of budget cuts.

The strike by some of the lowest-paid educators in the nation came the same day that Kentucky teachers flooded that state’s Capitol to protest changes to pensions. The demonstrations follow a successful strike last month by teachers in West Virginia.

Teachers say years of budget austerity in many states have led to the stagnation of already poor salaries.

“We have found our mojo. We won’t let anyone disinvest in public education, we are here for the long haul,” Alicia Priest, the head of the Oklahoma Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, told a cheering crowd outside the Capitol that organizers estimated at 30,000.

A teachers’ band played “We’re Not Gonna Take It” as educators carrying signs reading “How can you put students first if you put teachers last?” surrounded the statehouse in a picket line.

Holding up a 12-year-old textbook held together with duct tape, Hope Davis, a 15-year-old sophomore from Moore, told the rally, “Funding education shouldn’t be historic, it should be normal.”

The Republican-controlled legislature approved a $450 million revenue package last week to help fund teachers’ pay raises in the first major tax increase in a quarter century.

The funding raises by $5,000 the pay of teachers beginning their careers, and gives those with 25 years’ experience a nearly $8,000 raise.

But a bill raising pay for support personnel has not been signed, and teachers want lawmakers to restore funding from budget cuts that have forced some districts to impose four-day school weeks.

The Oklahoma Education Association had sought a $10,000 increase over three years for teachers and a $5,000 raise for support personnel.

According to National Education Association estimates for 2016, Oklahoma ranked 48th in average U.S. classroom teacher salary.

Oklahoma’s inflation-adjusted general funding per student dropped by 28.2 percent between 2008 and 2018, the biggest cut of any state, according to the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

In Kentucky, almost all the state’s 173 school districts were closed, most of them to allow teachers to protest, a spokesman for the Kentucky Education Association said.

Teachers were incensed by passage of a bill last week that mandates a hybrid pension plan with individual accounts for new hires. They also were monitoring passage of a budget bill that boosts base school funding and restores transportation funds, local media reported.