When I am elected as the vice president of the MTA, along with Max Page as president, you will have a leadership team in "Max and Deb" that fights for justice and wins with union power. I am the daughter of an educator. She was widowed at 44 with five children to raise. I know why all educators have a right to work one job with professional pay. My sister was one of the plaintiffs in the Hull teacher evaluation case that won the right to due process for educators without professional status. I saw up close why challenging a demoralizing, punitive evaluation system is critical for educator autonomy and our professional rights as education workers.
I’ve watched my daughter, a middle school math teacher, and her wife parent their 1-year-old daughter and seen that health care, child care and FMLA language are gender rights that demand justice in our workplace. When my daughter-in-law, an elementary school educator, faced job insecurity directly related to her three maternity leaves, it became crystal clear that parenting rights and maternity benefits at the worksite are a fundamental justice. These experiences and 25 years in the classroom have led me to these commitments: the dismantling of a racist high-stakes testing system; winning full funding for all of public education; and creating racial, social, gender and economic justice for the schools all students deserve. As your vice president, I will fight injustice with our union power.
In my 22 years as a local leader, I’ve learned that when we fight, we win. But our local was transformed by two actions. After bargaining two contracts in the open and creating a shared governance model with leadership from the elementary, middle and high school levels, we realized our full union power. Now instead of asking what the union is doing for me, members ask what it is that we can do as the union to better our working conditions and our professional rights. When I formed the South Shore Education Justice Alliance, we extended our power from the workplace into the community by creating relationships around our hopes and visions for a just world. Working with parents and community members, SSEJA has effectively addressed issues around mold, extreme heat indexes and smaller class sizes while engaging the community in the No On 2, Student Opportunity Act and Fair Share campaigns.
We have the opportunity to create an historic redistribution of wealth and power when we pass the Fair Share Amendment in November. This investment in educational justice will serve the betterment of the collective good. Max and I are the leaders with the capacity and the commitment to create this historic systemic change.
When you vote for Max and Deb on May 21, you will be voting for the schools and the communities that all students deserve, you will be voting for investment in a member-driven, rank-and-file union, and you will be voting for the power to create the just working conditions all education workers deserve.
