Thousands of striking West Virginia public school teachers, service personnel and their supporters show their solidarity at a rally Monday at the Capitol that featured United Mine Workers union President Cecil Roberts on Feb. 26, 2018.
Thousands of striking West Virginia public school teachers, service personnel and their supporters show their solidarity at a rally Monday at the Capitol that featured United Mine Workers union President Cecil Roberts on Feb. 26, 2018.
Education Reporter
South ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä High teacher Emily Comer said union members telling their leaders what to do in this year’s strike was “really cool.â€
Jay O’Neal, in his classroom at Stonewall Jackson Middle School. “When you’re out on strike you’ve got the upper hand and, if we’d demanded more, who knows what we would’ve got?†he said.
Sam Brunett, a local union official in Monongalia County, thought he was going back to work as an art teacher on the night of Feb. 28. His fellow workers didn’t agree.
Mingo County teacher Brandon Wolford at the state Capitol. “I let them know that I was their voice and what they told me to do, I did it,†he said of the union members he represents.
Early this year, West Virginia’s public school employees — despite legal threats and union leaders’ calls, later recanted, to return to work — held their first statewide strike. It was also the first such walkout to include teachers and service personnel, like bus drivers and cooks.
Those school workers are the 2018 Gazette-Mail West Virginians of the Year, but recent events have shown that the gains they won remain in doubt.
Gov. Jim Justice’s Public Employees Insurance Agency Task Force, created as part of a deal to end the strike, announced on Dec. 10 that it won’t recommend a long-term way to fund the state health insurance program at its current benefit levels before the next legislative session.
“Nine months after we demanded to be heard and [conveniently] one month after the election, the PEIA proposals for plan year 2020 have been released, and they are not a fix,†several past strikers said in a recent letter to the Gazette-Mail.
On Dec. 11, Senate President Mitch Carmichael, R-Jackson, announced he would replace union-supported Senate Education Committee Chairman Kenny Mann with vocal home- and private-school backer Sen. Patricia Rucker. Carmichael got to make the choice because, despite school unions overwhelmingly backing Democrats, neither the Senate nor the House of Delegates was pried away from Republican control.
Among Carmichael’s recently stated goals for the upcoming legislative session, which starts Jan. 9: giving West Virginia its first charter schools.
Some teachers were also irritated this month when Justice named Ed Gaunch his commerce secretary, keeping him in state government with a $95,000-per-year cabinet position a month after school workers celebrated his failure to be re-elected to the state Senate. Gaunch infamously told teachers during the strike that the worst that would happen if he lost is he’d go back to his “cushy†life as a retiree.
Teachers did get to keep a man who became a hero of the strikers, state Sen. Richard Ojeda, but only because his effort at a congressional seat failed with a nearly 13-percentage-point loss.
But with the Legislature returning on Jan. 9, the West Virginians of the Year recognition may be coming at the best time to remind lawmakers of something: that sound.
That sound that built early in the mornings, day after day, as thousands of school workers lined up to enter the Statehouse, waiting for hours to get past the metal detectors.
That sound that echoed in the Capitol’s lower and upper rotundas and through the large, middle well between them as the strikers began to make a literally gilded building, with soaring ceilings and marble pillars in its grand interior, seem a bit ... cramped.
That sound that, at its peak during legislative floor sessions, elbowed its way into the august chambers of lawmakers, and thundered above the sea of people and signs that covered the upper rotunda floor.
On that broad, marble plain, teachers, bus drivers, classroom aides and others chanted and shouted at the grand thresholds of both legislative chambers. It was the sound the halls of the Capitol make when people are unhappy enough — and motivated enough to change that — to shut down all public schools across the state for nine school days straight.
“Remember in November!†was among their chants.
There were victories in November — the vice chairmen of the Senate and House education committees were among the legislators defeated. But the most impressive wins were achieved during the strike, when school workers decided representative democracy needed to be accompanied, to put it mildly, with direct action.
The governor had initially proposed a 1 percent pay raise for just teachers and school service workers, with pledges for four annual 1 percent raises after that for the teachers.
The direct action was enough to change that into a 5 percent pay raise (equaling $2,020 for teachers) for a broad swath of school and state workers, effective July 1. Plus, the strike helped ensure no more health insurance cuts for this coverage year.
It also seemingly halted the momentum of various bills strikers opposed, like one that would’ve downplayed seniority’s role in protecting school workers from layoffs and transfers.
And as the November elections loomed closer, the state’s Republican leaders promised another 5 percent raise for this upcoming school year and another year of no health insurance cuts, with Justice offering $100 million more for PEIA.
The West Virginia strike also inspired teacher strikes in other states. Before the strike in Oklahoma actually began, but with its threat looming, that state’s teachers won a raise of about $6,000. Arizona teachers got a promise for a raise of 20 percent by 2020.
Here’s what four of the 36,000 school employees who went on strike this year said about what the state’s work stoppage meant, and what the future of the education labor movement may look like:
Comer, a 28-year-old South ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä High teacher, was born the year of West Virginia’s first teacher strike, in 1990. She was in her third year as a teacher when she went on strike.
She’s one of two administrators on a continuing online forum for public employees that another Kanawha County teacher, Jay O’Neal, set up a few months before the strike started.
Comer said she saw PEIA coverage getting worse every year.
“Right now, as a single person, you know it’s not so bad, but I want to be able to stay here and my friends are moving,†she said. “I felt like I was compelled to stay and fight for a West Virginia that young people can afford to stay in and raise a family in.â€
School employees had been organizing and talking, including on that “West Virginia Public Employees United†Facebook group O’Neal set up, before the West Virginia Education Association union rally on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
But when WVEA President Dale Lee referenced the 1990 strike that January day, Comer said she looked around and saw lawmakers’ jaws dropped and their eyes got wide, “and so did mine.â€
“We’re in new territory here,†Comer said she realized then.
Lee said at that rally that a strike was “not the first step in what we should do to achieve our goals, and if we were to get back to that, there’s a lot of groundwork that needs to be laid.â€
“I think he was trying to quell it,†Comer said. “But the fact that he felt compelled to even mention the word meant that what we were doing was not just some, like, little sideshow.â€
After the rally, there were walkouts in about 10 counties. State union leaders then called for a two-day statewide strike, but didn’t specify what would happen next.
Comer said she got chills when, on the second statewide strike day, a Friday, strikers at the Capitol chanted “See you Monday!†Immediately, someone started a chant of “See you Tuesday!â€
“We weren’t waiting for [state union leaders] to tell us,†said Comer, an American Federation of Teachers union member. “We were telling them, which was really cool.â€
She said the strike was exhilarating and exhausting, “and I missed my students and I thought about them constantly and wondered what they thought about what we were doing.â€
But she said she felt more determined every day and “with every fiber of my being I was going to stay out on strike no matter what.â€
“You can’t wait on anybody to come save you ... elections are important but, I think even more important is just, like, being organized and keeping in mind that, if we are determined together and organized together and we’re aware of our own power, it doesn’t matter who’s up there,†Comer said.
“None of them are our saviors, not even Ojeda,†she said with a laugh.
Even though she called the lack of a long-term funding solution for PEIA “a slap in the face,†she said recent events haven’t diminished her view of the strike’s effectiveness.
“It’s made me even more determined that our utilizing our collective power is necessary, in whatever shape that takes,†she said. She said another short-term “freeze†in current PEIA coverage won’t mean school workers will accept charter schools and other legislation.
Comer said other states’ school worker demonstrations have inspired her.
“This is really spreading all over the place,†she said. “This is, I don’t know, this is really huge, and I think that it’s nice to see West Virginia be first in something that’s good.â€
O’Neal, who teaches at Stonewall Jackson Middle School in ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä, said he taught in San Francisco and near Pittsburgh before moving to the Mountain State.
“Because I had taught other places, I don’t know what better way to put it, I’d kind of seen how much better it could be,†he said. “Like, this is my eighth year teaching, with a master’s degree ... I’m still making less than I was my first year in California.â€
He said the built-in step salary increases don’t really keep up with inflation, and PEIA was being cut every year.
“It just felt very unsustainable long-term,†said O’Neal, 38. “How can I keep doing this?â€
He said the momentum quickly built from “there’s no chance of a strike, there’s no chance of anything happening, to, suddenly, ‘Oh my God.’ â€
About 200 people attended the MLK Day WVEA rally. On Feb. 2, school workers in several Southern West Virginia counties held a single-day walkout and came to the Capitol to protest.
“That’s when I kind of thought, ‘Oh man, you’re not going to put the genie back in the bottle,’ †O’Neal said.
“People saw that, they watched the Facebook livestream, for instance, at lunch and during our planning period, of the teachers at the Capitol. I think everybody was really jealous, they wanted to be there with them,†he said. “Partly, honestly, just kind of like a release. Like people were so frustrated with some of the stuff I’m talking about for years.â€
Two weeks after that single-day walkout, there was a huge rally for the announcement of the statewide strike.
He remembered the moment strikers on the Capitol steps booed the state union leaders’ announced deal to end the strike.
“Here’s these teachers who, for years, have felt that no one was listening and frustrated and just felt like nothing was going to change — suddenly it was like they realized their collective power and voice,†said O’Neal, treasurer for Kanawha’s WVEA arm.
In the days after the deal’s announcement, strikers refused to return to work while particularly Senate Republicans refused to agree to the deal.
State union leaders eventually dropped their calls for the strike to end, and Senate Republicans eventually capitulated.
“Strikes work,†O’Neal said. He said emailing, calling and lobbying lawmakers hadn’t worked, and he didn’t think rallying at the Capitol was “really the key†either.
“The key was we shut schools down for nine days, and that causes real problems, you know, for families and everyone across the state, and if you inconvenience people enough, suddenly they’re more willing to listen and suddenly money they said they didn’t have magically appears,†he said.
He did say he wishes school workers had been “clearer with our demands early on so that our leadership, when they were meeting with [the governor], may have had a clearer idea of, really, hardcore, what we wanted.â€
“When you’re out on strike you’ve got the upper hand and, if we’d demanded more, who knows what we would’ve got?†he said.
He said that, following the strike, “I’m not nearly as interested sometimes in the right candidate or person, as I am more, you know, can they have a movement behind them or can there be some real grassroots movement to actually implement the change?†He said the civil rights movement’s success was because people were in the streets demanding change.
O’Neal said recent events haven’t changed his views on the strike’s effectiveness, but he wishes school workers had stayed more united in the time since.
He said Rucker’s appointment as Senate Education chairwoman showed “it’s going to be another battle.†He and others have formed a group called the WV United Caucus (like his Facebook page, it unites members of multiple unions), and he expects to push funding PEIA and hiring more counselors, psychologists and social workers in public schools.
“We see kids every single day that are impacted by trauma, all kinds of messed-up home lives, that need a lot more support,†he said.
O’Neal switched subjects this year to teach eighth-grade West Virginia Studies. He said it’s because he loves history and wanted to teach another part of West Virginia labor history: the mine wars.
Brunett, 54 and in his 25th year of teaching full-time in Monongalia County’s public schools, said the decision to strike was up to the members of his county’s AFT union. He leads the county’s union and was recently elected the state’s AFT treasurer.
“In November [of last year], you could just feel, like, the angst that was going on, but then people became more vocal, and far more vocal, than they usually are,†said Brunett, an art teacher at Morgantown High.
He recalled having an “informational picket†in front of a local Sheetz with his whole school. He said people brought their kids and donated food to feed children during the school shutdown.
In the evening of Feb. 27, Justice and state union leaders announced the deal they thought would end the strike, and the governor declared Feb. 28 a sort of “cooling-off†day. The plan was for schools to reopen the day after that.
“I was sitting down to dinner thinking I was going to go to school the next day,†Brunett said of the night of Feb. 28.
But around 6 p.m. of that “cooling-off†day, two teachers met at the old Morgantown Mall, posted on Facebook, and “within an hour, 150 teachers from Monongalia County were at the mall,†he said.
Brunett said someone put his number on Facebook, and he got a deluge of messages from people who didn’t want to go back to work the next day.
“I kind of thought my number was hijacked,†Brunett said, saying that made him “pissed off†at the time.
“But they called me out, man, which was eventually a good thing,†he said. He said he had to have a difficult conversation with the county schools superintendent, who had already announced school was resuming.
The Republican-controlled Senate didn’t agree to the announced deal at first, the strike continued after the state union leaders’ call for it to end, and, eventually, the 5 percent raise deal for school workers became 5 percent for them plus state employees more broadly.
“Now, it was one of the coolest things that happened,†Brunett said of the refusal to end the strike. “I know there were things like that happening all over the state.â€
Of some recent events, Brunett said he thinks Carmichael is “taunting on purpose.†Carmichael has denied that.
Brunett also referred to Justice’s PEIA Task Force as the “task farce.â€
“The pot’s steaming,†he said.
Wolford, 30, said he began fighting on labor issues right after his first year of teaching. The fight was on a personal subject: his own layoff.
After the layoff, he said he was passed over for a chance to get back into teaching by someone with even less seniority, so he filed a grievance and won.
“When they did that I thought, you know, I’m going to start standing up, so I did,†Wolford said. “Big mistake on their part because I’ve been at it ever since.â€
Wolford, a special education teacher at Lenore K-8 and president of Mingo County’s WVEA arm, was vocal in supporting this year’s strike.
He said health insurance was the main reason he wanted to strike. He noted the Go365 wellness plan, which would’ve given employees points for things like completing health assessments and meeting health goals, but raised premiums and deductibles for those who didn’t earn enough points.
“I thought that was more like a form of communism,†he said. “I don’t like being told what to do and I didn’t want to pay the extra premiums.â€
Other than the insurance, he said lawmakers “were taking every cheap shot they could get to try to break up our unions.†He also noted promised raises that weren’t delivered.
“I just kind of had the attitude and I spread it to everybody else: Fire us,†Wolford said. He said that with low pay compared to other states and teacher vacancies already “you can’t replace us, so, ball’s in our court, we have the upper hand.â€
“I couldn’t have done this if it wasn’t for all the people in my county backing us,†he said. “I mean I did keep them in an uproar. I let them know that I was their voice and what they told me to do, I did it.â€
Mingo was among the few Southern West Virginia counties to participate in the first “Fed Up Friday†school employee walkout on Feb. 2, preceding the call for a statewide strike. Wolford said Mingo workers were the first to vote to take part in the walkout — Wolford himself made the motion.
On Feb. 2, Wolford said, “I’d seen the attitudes of the legislators that were there, they were just kind of laughing at us, they weren’t really taking us very seriously. So I saw then that we weren’t going to get anywhere, that we would actually have to physically show them that we were not going to go back.â€
He said that during the statewide strike, “we all stood together. It didn’t matter what union we were in ... there was never any us versus you, it was all of us versus the legislators.â€
“It didn’t seem like we had that strong of a voice in the election as we did during the strike,†Wolford said. But he said a majority of Mingo’s Board of Education did change in a way he favored.
He said he doesn’t feel Republican lawmakers have “learned their lesson yet.â€
“If they take from you and you don’t stop it, they will continue to take more and more,†Wolford said of lawmakers. “And they need to realize that we will do it again.â€
Unprompted, he said, “I will neither confirm nor deny that another event is being scheduled similar to Fed Up Friday, just to let them know we’re still here during the legislative session.â€
“If we have to go back out again, we will,†he said, “and we’re more than ready.â€
A proposed hydroelectric generating facility in Tucker County would drive away tourists and threaten endangered wildlife, says a citizen group that opposes the project.
Among other things, the $1.2 billion pumped storage hydroelectric plant, called the Big Run Pump Storage Hydro Project, would harm the Monongahela National Forest, Friends of Blackwater wrote last week.
“The Proposal would be a blow to the critical and vulnerable local outdoor recreation, scenic, and heritage recreation economy,†Friends of Blackwater wrote to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, one of the entities that will have to sign off on the project.
The Big Run Pump Storage Hydro Project would be located on land owned by Western Pocahontas Properties and the Monongahela National Forest and involve building a closed-loop pump-storage hydroelectric generating facility with two new reservoirs, according to plans submitted to the FERC.
According to current plans, the upper reservoir would be built on Big Run, and the lower would be on Mill Run, a tributary to the Cheat River.
“The upper reservoir is being proposed on a rare and sensitive wetland area of the state, the Big Run Bog National Natural Landmark,†Jacob Harrell, hydropower coordination biologist for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources, wrote in comments filed with the FERC. “This area is a large wetland complex of great importance that would be irrevocably destroyed should the upper reservoir be allowed to be constructed on it.â€
FreedomWorks, LLC, the Harpers Ferry company planning the project, first applied in August for a preliminary permit to study the feasibility of the project. FERC accepted the preliminary application on Oct. 29 and opened a 60-day window for comments and motions to intervene.
The project is in the public interest, the company said in its application, because it would create a way to store extra energy, particularly from intermittent renewable sources when demand is low, “while creating energy jobs in an economically depressed area which has lost energy related jobs in the transition away from coal.â€
Plus, it’s a reliable, environmentally protective way to make the most of West Virginia’s natural resources, FreedomWorks, LLC wrote.
That’s not true, the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy wrote to the FERC, urging the commission to deny the preliminary permit. The shift to renewable energy is crucial, the group wrote, but this project would mean constructing “industrial-scale infrastructure in natural areas.â€
Pump-storage hydropower still uses electricity from renewables, natural gas, coal or fuels to power the pumps, meaning it’s not truly renewable, the West Virginia Rivers Coalition wrote in comments to the FERC submitted Thursday.
The U.S. Department of the Interior echoed that in comments to the FERC, noting potentially adverse effects on the fisheries, migratory birds and the bald eagle, among other species. In its comments, the U.S. Forest Service noted the project could negatively affect the Big Run Bog National Natural Landmark in the Monongahela National Forest.
Tim Williamson, CEO of FreedomWorks, LLC, said Thursday he didn’t plan to touch the Big Run Bog and would change the project’s name. In response to the FERC comments, he submitted an updated draft study plan. The current estimated cost for project feasibility studies, the plan says, is $1,170,000. FERC likely won’t make a decision about the permit for many more weeks due to the partial government shutdown, Williamson said. Still, he said he believed the project was viable.
“I don’t know. I’m still of the opinion that it could be. I don’t see anything so far that’s pulled it out of the realm of possibility,†he said.
The status of the project might be contingent on whether it’s right on top of previously mined property. Several environmental groups expressed concern in their comments that the project could cause acid mine drainage problems.
“That’s really the key to this whole thing. If there’s an underground mine underneath there, there’s no chance in hell this thing’s being built,†Williamson said. “Because if it is, it’s game over. It doesn’t matter if there’s flying squirrels in the area or not.â€
