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Stick Together, Stay On Message, Tell Your Story

Wyoming NEA members and coalition partners win nearly $50 million for educator pay raises.

Paul Rogers, here in his classroom, drew on lessons of local elections to coordinate a statewide pay campaign.

One very snowy day in February, when roads were closed and the temperature had plunged to 5 degrees, some 300 determined people huddled on the steps of the Wyoming state Capitol.

They stood there for an hour, steam rising from their mouths, as speakers talked about the importance of schools staffed with quality educators and the tragedy of losing qualified teachers to other states that pay better salaries.

Rally organizers called for a decent raise for teachers, ESP, and school administrators, and they had powerful stats to back that demand:

Wyoming ranks 43^rd in teacher salaries, lost 143 teachers in the last school year, and began this year with 54 unfilled positions--for a state with just 7,400 full-time teaching slots.

It may have been brisk outside, but it was chillier yet inside the Capitol, where legislators grappled with the fact that both the rally organizers and a vast majority of the shivering participants were voting, taxpaying parents.

It was that kind of legislative session in Cheyenne this year.

Wyoming's frugal lawmakers, who had failed to implement three successive state Supreme Court decisions ordering proper funding of the educational system, were given an eight-week-long wake-up call on education pay--by everyone from parents and educators to physicians and business people.

Legislators were buried in an unprecedented avalanche of E-mails, letters, phone calls, and personal visits, all stressing the need to use part of Wyoming's $700 million budget surplus to enhance recruitment and retention of quality school employees at all levels.

"One legislator said he received more E-mails, calls, and letters on this issue than on crime, snowmobiling, and wolves in Yellowstone National Park," reports Paul Rogers, a Riverton Middle School social studies teacher who coordinated the Wyoming Education Association's district-by-district involvement in this grassroots campaign.

The overall drive to boost educator pay was steered by "A Call to Action," a solid pro-public education coalition comprised of WEA, the Wyoming Association for School Adminstrators, and the Wyoming School Board Association. The coalition partners, supported by many other groups statewide, successfully created a "bandwagon atmosphere" around the pay issue, Rogers points out.

The legislature finally jumped aboard the bandwagon on February 26, approving a $75 million supplement to the two-year budget passed in 2000. The supplemental budget's biggest single category: a $47.85 million "external cost adjustment" to boost teacher, ESP, and administrator pay and benefits.

Even the cautious Governor Jim Geringer, who had wanted to study the salary issue until next year, caught a ride on the bandwagon. He neither signed nor vetoed the budget bill, letting it become law.

In places like Riverton, Wyoming, teachers and administrators joined forces to boost educator pay.

Now, it seems, everyone in Wyoming is focused on education pay. The legislature will require each of the state's 48 districts to report next year how they spent their share of the $47.85 million, while the Wyoming Supreme Court will scrutinize how the legislature implements its latest school funding decision, handed down smack in the middle of the February budget debate.

Among other things, this landmark ruling calls for the indexing of state education funding to the cost of living, and adjustment of administrative and ESP salaries "to account for differences in experience, responsibility, and seniority."

Moreover, the ruling holds that if teacher salaries are not adequately adjusted for inflation, they'll no longer be "constitutionally based."

What accounts for Wyoming's legislative and judicial progress on education pay at a time when so many states are struggling to hire and keep good teachers? Some clues from the front lines:

• Members of the Wyoming school community stuck together.
  "'Call to Action' coalition partners--teachers and ESP, administrators, and school board members--had opportunities to break apart, but no one was willing to do so," says WEA President Gary McDowell. "We made sure we stayed together all the way because of the critical nature of this legislation."

• Everyone stayed "on message."
  WEA attorneys and lobbyists delivered an identical message to Supreme Court justices and legislators: You can't maintain a quality education workforce without quality pay.

  And that message was repeated by grassroots coalition lobbyists in every district, notes WEA political coordinator Paul Rogers, a veteran of successful local school board and bond campaigns.

  "We followed the advice of an NEA palm card I keep in my wallet," he says. "Simply, it's keep the message short and never vary it, stay positive, and stay on message until the bitter end."

• The school community educated the public on the teacher shortage.
  Through everything from teacher letters to the editor to coalition TV and radio ads, taxpayers learned that Wyoming teacher recruitment is way down and that the quality of too many teaching applicants is slipping.

  To drive the point home, one coalition-produced TV program featured a panel discussion by top experts on recruitment: school superintendents and personnel managers.

  Another spot, taped at a Colorado university teacher fair, exposed viewers to the sad sight of Wyoming recruiters sitting unvisited at their tables--while a Texas recruiter described how he hires one or two Wyoming teachers a year, "sets a trail," and then revisits Wyoming repeatedly to follow the bread crumbs to other prospective hires.

• Everyone told their story.
  In Albany County School District #1, the administration and 240-member Albany County Education Association jointly collected data that dramatized the recruitment crisis--such as a fall-off in the number of junior high and high school teaching applicants, and the personnel manager's declining "quality" scores for applicants.

  Then educators, from ACEA President Stephanie Weigel to Superintendent Charles Head, delivered this damaging information to legislators in nearby Cheyenne.

  "We tried to keep our lobbying real positive," recalls Weigel, a second grade teacher at Laramie's Thayer Elementary. "All kinds of people spoke out.

  "One teacher with a wife and two children admitted at a legislative hearing that his family was on food stamps --that was real powerful," says Weigel. "And some Laramie student teachers visited the Capitol for a day while regular teachers covered their classes. One future teacher told a legislator, 'I'm not staying in Wyoming. How can I?'"

• NEA stood at the side of Wyoming educators.
  The 5,500-member Wyoming Education Association "would never have been able to mount a statewide campaign without a $60,000 grant we received from NEA," stresses political coordinator Rogers. "That money allowed WEA to buy advertising and many other campaign necessities, plus pay for release time for me to focus on the nuts and bolts of organizing."

  This grant--funded by a $5 dues increase passed last year by the NEA Representative Assembly to defend and promote public education-was a "key factor in our victory," adds WEA staffer Ron Sniffin. "We were the only coalition partner that had cash. That helped us get our message out effectively."

For more, go to www.wyoea.org.