Use My Story, But Not My Name

Colombian education unionists tell foreign visitors--including an NEA representative--of threats, murders, and kidnappings in their ranks.

When American teachers tell "war stories," they're likely to talk about unruly students or obnoxious administrators. When teachers in Colombia tell such stories, they speak of real bullets.

Last year, no fewer than 82 members of Colombia's largest educators' union, the Federación Colombiana de Educadoras, were assassinated. That crisis prompted the union to organize a February forum in Bogotá for visitors from NEA and Education International, the world alliance of educators' unions.

Colombian educators packed a small meeting room to tell the foreign delegation what civil war has done to them, their families, and their work. No one wanted their names or photos used, because publication could bring death.

One educator from northern Colombia said he saw right-wing gunmen kill two teachers last October. Because this teacher is a potential witness, his name is now on the death list. The list is well-known in the area--his position is number 10.

This educator was also abruptly fired after he and a priest tried to organize a community meeting against the violence.

Another speaker said her brother was murdered for union activity. Then her partner was killed in front of her eight-year-old son. As a witness, the eight-year-old was added to the death list--that's when this mother decided to leave the area.

Most of the violence is happening in rural areas, so victims seek refuge in the cities, reports Jill Christianson of the NEA Office of International Relations, who was part of the delegation.

The worst perpetrators, the guests were told, are right-wing paramilitaries connected to elements of the government. But left-wing guerrillas are also responsible for some attacks.

Schools and teachers are caught in the crossfire because both sides want to recruit students and because teachers are community leaders, Christianson says. "One older man," she reports, "talked about his three daughters. The guerrillas kidnapped his oldest daughter, and by the time they let her go, she had developed serious psychological problems.

"Then they took his second daughter," Christianson adds. "She came back brainwashed, a guerrilla herself. Finally they phoned to demand his third daughter. He fled to Bogotá."

Education International and NEA are providing immediate help to displaced workers. NEA is working with the Colombian union to advocate for government protection of threatened workers and for their safe return home.

"There are no simple answers in Colombia, but I hope we can at least alleviate some of the difficulties of these educators--after they've survived so much," says Christianson.

The trip was organized in response to a 2002 NEA Representative Assembly new business item that called for the Association to inform members about the plight of Colombian educators and work with Education International to help the victims. Also as part of this response, Wisconsin NEA members Robert Fullmer and Glenn Schmidt visited Colombia in March on a fact-finding trip organized by the AFL-CIO.

--Alain Jehlen

For more: Contact the NEA Office of International Relations, oir@nea.org.

New Mexico Educators Gain Bargaining Rights

• In March, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson signed legislation that restores and extends bargaining for 30,000 New Mexico school employees. NEA-New Mexico (NEA-NM) leaders and members worked closely with the governor, legislators, and other groups to craft this bill, which makes collective bargaining rights permanent for all public employees.
  The new law--the last bargaining statute expired in 1999--provides for binding arbitration in the event of an impasse in contract negotiations, reinstates a state labor relations board, and provides an opportunity for educators to discuss and reach agreement over instructional issues.
  "This law will benefit all of New Mexico's children by giving a greater voice to the people who work with them closely every day," says NEA President Reg Weaver. "It provides a great framework for public schools and education employees to reach agreements that will raise student achievement across the state."
  "This is the culmination of our success in electing people who believe public school employees should have an equal voice in matters that not only affect our working conditions, but students' learning conditions," adds NEA-NM President Eduardo Holguin.
• In late winter, members of the Colorado Education Association (CEA) and MEA-MFT in Montana joined with public education supporters in mass rallies for adequate state funding.

  Colorado members rallied in Denver to reaffirm support for constitutional Amendment 23, which, among other things, links per-pupil spending to the rate of inflation and designates a portion of income tax revenue to the State Education Fund. That measure has boosted the state from 45th to 41st place in school aid to schools.

  In Montana, MEA-MFT members and others gathered in nine regional rallies. Their key message: Montanans want adequate funding for preK-graduate school education, and they want legislators to raise revenues to pay for it. "To do otherwise would be to sacrifice our kids to a short-term fix," declared state Rep. Brad Newman.

Preventing Medical Errors

NEA and the AFT team up to address troubling healthcare issue.

When 17-year-old Jesica Santillan died Feb. 22 after receiving transplanted organs with the wrong blood type, her death made headlines across the country. But the same day, with little or no publicity, about 250 other people also died in U.S. hospitals as the result of medical errors--mistakes which, like the one that killed Santillan, could have been prevented.

Between 44,000 and 98,000 people die each year because of medical errors during hospitalizations, according to a 1999 report from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. Even at the low end of that range, the report noted, those numbers make medical errors the nation's eighth leading cause of death, slightly ahead of car accidents.

The report outlined some relatively simple improvements that could dramatically cut the error rate. "It would be irresponsible to expect anything less than a 50 percent reduction in errors over five years," the report noted.

That was more than three years ago. Has anything changed? "We've seen pockets of dramatic improvement," says Donald Berwick, a pediatrician and president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and one of the report's authors. "Some of the hospitals we work with have had tenfold reductions in adverse drug events. But overall, we're a long way from the goal. We're still building the will for change, and we're working to alter some deeply ingrained behaviors and attitudes in the healthcare system."

Fighting medical errors is one of the projects of the NEAFT Partnership Joint Council. The NEA and AFT are members of the Leapfrog Group, a coalition of more than 130 public and private organizations that sponsor healthcare benefit plans. The Leapfrog Group promotes three reforms that could reduce the death toll by more than 50 percent--or over 100 lives a day:

• Get doctors to stop scribbling prescriptions on slips of paper and start using computers equipped with error prevention software that flags those which may contain mistakes.
• Refer patients who need certain complex procedures to hospitals that offer the best chance of survival.
• Staff intensive care units with doctors who have credentials in critical care medicine.

How can NEA and AFT affect hospital policies? One way is through collective bargaining. The two unions have so far trained about 400 of their negotiators on medical errors and the Leapfrog reforms. These negotiators, responsible for well over 1,000 labor agreements, can push school districts to use the Leapfrog ideas as criteria for choosing healthcare providers for employees.

In Wisconsin, WEA Trust, a nonprofit organization created by the NEA-affiliated Wisconsin Education Association Council to provide insurance and other services for school employees, joined a local Leapfrog group that has started putting hospital safety data on the Web. "That was quite controversial at first," says WEA Trust Executive Director Al Jacobs. "The hospitals were not happy." Jacobs concedes that the statistics are far from perfect as measures of hospital quality, but he says a University of Oregon study showed that hospitals whose data are published make greater efforts to improve.

"Very often the front-line healthcare professionals are blamed for these medical errors. But changing the system is what is needed to reduce the number of errors," says Candice Owley, chair of the AFT's healthcare division.

This article, the third in a series on healthcare issues and how they affect educators, is a project of the NEAFT Partner-ship. A primary aim of the partnership is to keep members of both unions informed about joint programs and activities in areas of common concern. NEA staff writer Alain Jehlen wrote this article, which also appears in the May-June issue of American Teacher.

School Nurses Stretched Thin

A public school may not be as dangerous as a hospital intensive care unit, but medical errors can happen there, too. In a survey of more than 600 school nurses conducted by University of Iowa professor Ann Marie McCarthy, half of the nurses reported medical errors at their schools during the past year. Although most errors were missed doses, there also were significant numbers of overdoses and wrong medications.

The National Association of School Nurses recommends one nurse for every 750 students, but McCarthy reported that the actual student/nurse ratio is almost twice that.

Meanwhile, "inclusion" has brought more students who need sophisticated medical support into the schools. McCarthy's survey found that more than 5 percent of students take medication, and 75 percent of medications are given to students by someone other than a school nurse.

That can be dangerous, says Carolyn Seifert, a registered nurse at Lake Silver Elementary School in Orlando, Florida, and a member of the Florida Education Association, a joint NEA-AFT state affiliate. Two years ago, she noticed something strange about a medicine tablet she was about to give a third-grader. It didn't look right--and it wasn't. The child's mother had put her husband's powerful heart medication in the boy's bottle by mistake. Giving a small child an adult dose of the heart drug could have stopped his heart, says Seifert. And someone with less training might not have noticed. According to the Iowa State survey, errors were three times more likely when someone other than a nurse administered the medication.

"Sometimes," says Seifert, "a para doesn't want to give out medication because she's fearful of making a mistake, but the principal says, 'Do it.' The principal may not like it, either, but he knows the parents want the medication to be given in school." The solution, she says, would be to hire more school nurses, but with budget cuts and new mandates to raise test scores, she doesn't see that happening soon.