Congratulations Graduates, Democratic Unionism and End of Year Updates

Dear member,

First off, we want to congratulate all of the 2020 BPS and CoAH graduates and everyone who “attended” the city-wide virtual graduation this weekend! The BTU released a video congratulating everyone on Friday afternoon. We were joined by U.S. Congresswoman Pressley, the McCourty brothers from the Patriots, Celtics Center Enes Kantor, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, U.S. Senator Warren, Red Sox Outfielder Jackie Bradley Junior, Ron Roenicke, the Red Sox Manager and many more. Please share the BTU video with our graduating seniors and their families!

Second, we would like to take a moment to address one of several resolutions passed at the BTU membership meeting last week. The first two resolutions were on Climate Justice and Universal Health Care and will be submitted at our national AFT convention this summer (along with a call to support Young Workers that was previously approved). A third called for the Contract Action Teams, and a fourth, for “Building an Anti-Racist Union.” The last two were brought to the body of the membership and presented by rank and file BTU members.

Please see this statement from BTU President Jessica Tang regarding the “Building an Anti-Racist Union” resolution: 

Parts of the “Building an Anti-Racist Union” resolution that was passed by the BTU governing body of rank and file members by a majority vote last week has received strong and impassioned support from many of our educators, as well as from parents and from community members, and has also elicited some concerns from among individuals in those same groups.

We thank everyone who attended the meeting to cast their vote and speak their opinion on this and the other business at hand, and we also thank everyone who wrote shared their opinions after the fact.

As most readers of this bulletin are aware, any resolution can be brought to the membership for a vote by an individual BTU member, which is what occurred with this matter last week.

We are a democratic union and we are committed to bottom-up unionism and to rank and file member engagement.

Like other resolutions, the “Building an Anti-Racist Union” resolution was submitted by a rank and file member and was voted on and approved by a simple democratic majority, following Robert’s Rules of Order.

There were 439 people present, including the staff. 210 members voted in favor, 153 voted against, and there were 17 active abstentions. It was debated over an hour, and was supported a second time after one member properly moved to reconsider it. These resolutions are not only passed democratically, but they are also, more often than not, largely aspirational.

For example, two other resolutions passed recently by BTU membership called for universal national health care and the passage of the Green New Deal, but both will be an uphill battle to see into fruition. However, they are statements of beliefs and what the democratic will of the membership wants its union to be working towards.

Similarly, while the resolution in question calls for the removal of Boston Police and Boston School Police from our schools, that is not something that will be actualized immediately. Rather, the resolution serves as a statement that the BTU does not believe that schools should NEED to have police in them in order to be safe – and furthermore, that we DO need funding for social workers, guidance counselors, and school psychologists, which we currently do NOT have an adequate number of in all of our schools. The latter was also called for in the resolution. 

To be clear, there WILL be school police in our schools this fall.

Any thoughtful transition would require many conversations, and also would need to consider that many of the school police officers are Black and Latinx themselves. As part of our anti-racism work, the impact on those officers needs to be considered, as well.

The resolution is not about any specific individual, but rather it is about a broken system that we are trying to reform. What we have very clearly heard from those who supported this resolution, is that we aspire to have schools that are safe and welcoming environments for all ⁠— where school police and BPD are not needed.

It is our hope that our resolution will help to further a dialogue about the role of policing in our schools, and what we need to do to fully support our students and schools. 

This is, of course, not to say that there aren’t effective and supportive resource officers or BPD working with our schools.

However, while some may feel safer with uniformed police present, many, particularly in our black and brown communities, do not feel safer.

It also forces us to question what the role of police or school resource officers should be in schools; how do we ensure that they are there to support students, not just to discipline them; how do we ensure that policing practices that are harmful in our communities are not replicated in our schools; and, with limited resources (while we continue to fight for more), what supports for students should we be investing those resources in?

The day after the resolution was passed, I reached out to the Presidents of the police unions, and a couple of those unions also reached out to me. We had a productive conversation and have set up a meeting this week to continue the important dialogue.

The resolution submitted by and voted on by the membership makes clear that we must have a vision and aspiration for what type of schools we believe our students deserve, that we must decriminalize schools, and that we must also spur dialogue and conversation about the unintended consequences of policing in schools.

We need to continue pressing forward in the discussion about the need to ensure we have supportive schools were social-emotional behavioral needs are prioritized over punitive disciplinary practices that often contribute to pushing students out of school and into what is often called the “school to prison pipeline.”  

This work will not happen overnight, and all voices are encouraged and invited to contribute to the dialogue both through our listening tours and through our union meetings, and through other forums that we will be setting up this summer, including the call for a BTU Truth and Reconciliation Committee (passed in the same resolution). 

The power of a democratic institution is that everyone can and should have a voice.

It also means we may not always agree with each other, and we may also still have differences, but at the end of the day, we have much more to gain together and learn together as a union, as we continually strive to bring members together in order to build unity around important collective initiatives.

In a time when tensions and stress are high and there is so much unrest and uncertainty, emotions are quick to escalate and can cause communities to divide, we ask everyone to remember that we do have strength in unity, and we grow by listening to each other and creating opportunities for dialogue. We ask that we treat each other with civility, kindness, and empathy — this is what we teach and expect from our students. 

As Frederick Douglas wrote, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning.”

We are living through the struggle for social, racial and economic justice, and while it may feel uncomfortable or unsettling, this is exactly what this moment in times calls for us to do in order to make progress.

We will continue to struggle together as we strengthen our unity through acknowledging differences in experiences and views, and as we also strive for a collective understanding of that which we may not fully understand.