Eagle Era

Leaving the public in the dark about union proceedings leaves the public confused

Lance Wang

For about half a month, AHS was filled with rumors about the possibility of a strike with no conclusion in sight. Most students were confused about when or even if the strike would even happen. 

During the lead-up to the potential strike, many students struggled to find reliable sources of and mainly relied on hearsay. According to Rishaan Joshi (12), “Every single time I heard of a date of when it could possibly happen, it was always rumors that other teachers would spread to their students because those are rumors that the other teachers had also heard… There was just speculation, but students and teachers would go around saying it as if it was a definitive date.”

Herein lies a greater problem about the relationship between the union and the public: there’s not enough communication. The FUDTA website lacks any sort of public news section that doesn’t require a login, and apart from an about page, a leadership page, and the FUDTA contract, there is nothing else the public can access. According to Joshi, “A lot of the union website is locked right now behind logins. But I had to go to district meetings and ask Mr. Elam or Mr. Savoie things just to figure out what was actually going on with the union.” However, the district doesn’t have this issue. “The district had newsletters constantly being sent out to parents, so it was very, very easy to catch up on that,” Joshi said. 

The lack of clear communication with the union doesn’t just end with the public. According to Mr. Elam, one of two AHS strike captains, “Communication between sites for the union is through a private Facebook group that you can only post things if the executive board approves it. I made a request post asking for where I could find the data that they were using in their negotiations, and it was not approved to be posted until several days after we quit, which was about a week later.” Without proper transparency between the union and teachers, passing on information to students becomes more difficult as a result.

The importance of knowing what is happening in the union lies in a few key places. The most glaring example is the strike from earlier this month. Accurate information about the strike was difficult to come by, and much of the information that students received was vague or misleading. Additionally, knowing about relevant policy changes would greatly benefit students as well. Funding and class sizes are both highly important topics that impact students as a whole.

This lack of communication seems to stem from the limited number of platforms the union can communicate from. Parent Square and Google Classroom, two major sources of info for parents and students, are not available for the union to communicate through. However, limited access doesn’t have to mean limited outreach. At the very least, creating a regularly updated, transparent webpage could help clear up rumors before they start.

Caption: Despite the large number of people that discussed the conditions of the union, few connections were able to be made about the state of negotiations. (Photo Credit: Kingston Lo (12))