https://themilitant.com/2019/11/29/indiana-teachers-rally-for-higher-pay-better-working-conditions-2/
Indiana teachers rally for higher pay, better working conditions
By Kaitlin Estill
Vol. 83/No. 45
December 9, 2019
Socialist Workers Party member Kaitlin Estill, right, speaks with art
teacher Diana Sale at rally of over 12,000 in Indianapolis Nov. 19
backing teachers’ fight for pay raise, smaller class sizes.
Militant/Carl Weinberg
Socialist Workers Party member Kaitlin Estill, right, speaks with art
teacher Diana Sale at rally of over 12,000 in Indianapolis Nov. 19
backing teachers’ fight for pay raise, smaller class sizes.
INDIANAPOLIS — “Enough is enough!” was the main slogan as over 12,000
teachers and their supporters rallied around the state Capitol Building
here Nov. 19, demanding higher pay, smaller classes and better working
conditions. Indiana comes in dead last of the 50 states for teachers’
pay increases over the last 15 years.
Over 145 school districts cancelled classes because of the large number
of teachers who joined the action.
The protest was backed by both the National Education Association and
the American Federation of Teachers.
Members of the Socialist Workers Party who joined the rally met Diana
Sale, an art teacher who has been teaching for 30 years. She explained
that she has to have a second job to meet all her expenses.
“And the state legislature recently passed a rule that teachers who want
to renew their license —which they have to do every five years — now
have to complete an ‘externship’ of 15 hours of unpaid work with a local
business, on top of their teaching responsibilities,” she said. “Our
union has to take this on.”
“I spent about $400 at the beginning of the year trying to get my
classroom together,” Brenda Johnson, a fifth-grade teacher at the Gary
Community School Corp., told the Times of Northwest Indiana at the
rally. Her school system was in such a crisis it was taken over by the
state in 2017.
“I shouldn’t have to pay for paper, pencils, posters, crayons, markers,”
she said. “The pay is not good enough.”
Most protesters were dressed in red, as teachers and other school
workers wore in a series of protests last year in West Virginia,
Kentucky, Arizona, North Carolina and other states. They called their
protest Red for Ed Action Day.
“As I look out into this sea of red, I see hope and I see our future,”
AFT-Indiana President GlenEva Dunham told the rally. “This is just a
beginning.”
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David Hume
“ In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees
of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral
evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence. ”
― David Hume,
