Hundreds attend as 20 speakers give remarks at SMSD Board meeting with messages of support for teachers, demand for fairer treatment

Watch the full board meeting above, per SMSD’s YouTube channel. 

After months of contractual impasse in an effort to resolve teacher contracts in the Shawnee Mission School District, hundreds of concerned teachers, students, parents and citizens sported red clothing for #RedforEd and filled board room 2 beyond capacity for the third straight time at the SMSD School Board meeting Monday. 

20 speakers gave remarks during the public comment section of the meeting, in which citizens are encouraged to give speeches of three minutes or less regarding topics of public interest — most, in this case, revolved around the teacher contract dispute. 

The SMSD underwent five unsuccessful contract negotiations and two mediations this summer in an effort to resolve them, since many teachers received less pay this year than the previous two years due to increased insurance costs that weren’t matched by a raise. Teachers became unnerved when $5 million of a $9.6 million state grant was spent on transportation along with new building costs and utilities rather than increasing teacher pay or bolstering insurance, according to social studies teacher Stephen Laird. 

Applause swept the room as each name was announced and each speech was finished, spanning central points such as the teachers’ lower comparative pay, the board not fulfilling “basic requirements,” the increased workload from five teaching hours to six per day and the “lack of respect” beyond the question of money. 

“A multitude of logical, mathematically sound, verifiable reasons have been presented to [the board] on why you should freely disseminate the more than $4.5 million you are choosing to misallocate for teacher relief,” East english teacher Meredith Sternberg said at the meeting. “Your argument, why you believe the funds should be reallocated, has been analyzed and found to be without merit.” 

The district’s reasoning on saving the remaining funds after spending $5 million of the grant, instead of distributing it to teachers, was to conserve for future years where the same $9.6 million would not be granted — and a grant of only $3 million is expected to come to the district next year, according to SMSD Chief Communications Manager David Smith. 

And the amount it would cost to reduce teacher schedules from six class periods to five — a primary concern voiced in the meeting’s public comment portion — would cost more than the $4.6 million remaining from the grant, Smith said. 

Current portions of the SMSD’s announced Strategic Plan include moving the workload from six hours to five, but not until the fall semester of 2021. 

“To explain to teachers that the district will begin to study how to move the workload from six to five with a Strategic Plan in the fall of 2021 feels disrespectful,” SM North teacher Erin Rivers said at the meeting. “Pay attention to your foundation, SMSD. Reduce our class sizes. Lighten our workload.”

But some teachers feel new buildings and utilities should come second to their salaries. Given the added — and to a majority of public comment speakers, overly stressful — workload for less comparative pay, many felt wronged and cheated, according to Laird. 

“As I hold my breath, I’m waiting for this board to decide [on teacher contracts], I’m trying to figure out where I can cut back in my budget even more,” district elementary teacher Jennifer Danaher said at the meeting. “You are looking at numbers. It’s time you look at the people who are affected by your decision, not just the numbers on a spreadsheet.” 

“We’re organized, the teachers are already clearly organized, and parents are starting to organize,” French said at the meeting. “When [the board] attacks teachers, which is what you’re doing, you attack their families, and you attack my family. Parents and the community are going to stand with the teachers.”

At the end of the public comment section, SMSD School Board President Brad Stratton announced the district’s movement toward the fact-finding phase — which involves a designated, mutually agreed-upon fact-finder compiling a report that would form a verdict on whether to keep with the district’s current offered salary, or move to the National Education Association-Shawnee Mission’s suggested amount. 

The process will take place “preferably toward the end of [November] if possible,” Stratton said at the meeting. “That’s what the state law says.” 

Laird felt the night to be a tone-switch from the last two board meetings where teachers had utilized the public comment section to voice their concerns on the impasse, with remarks moving from simply stating “we’re overworked to actually putting the blame where it belongs.” 

“I think [the board] got a message tonight,” Laird said. Their tone was very different tonight, their faces were very different tonight. So I think, I hope, tonight was the breaking point.” 

Beyond the public comment section, the board was given a presentation regarding the district’s ACT test-taking process and its scores by demographic, followed by a short questioning period and vote on the approval of a CenturyLink telecommunications contract to prevent phone outages.

Specific ways for the process to be improved in the district were discussed, with an emphasis on counselors directly approaching students who weren’t scheduled to take the test to boost awareness and motivation to take it.

ACT scores in the district were found to reflect national averages by demographic en masse, according to the presentation, but some differences were present in more specific realms. Of African-American high school students that earned an A, B or C in Algebra 2, only 23% met the college readiness benchmark for the district. 

Superintendent Dr. Michael Fulton also brought up what he described as a longstanding potential bias in which demographics were most successful in taking the test, with Asian-American students continually earning the highest scores and African-American students earning the lowest. 

“Is there some implicit bias in the test? If you ask ACT, the answer is no,” Fulton said at the meeting. “But it is interesting that that trend exists and continues to exist. That’s been going on, well, for…I started studying it in the mid-2000s and it certainly existed then.”

Following the report on the district’s ACT involvement, a presentation to the board by SMSD Executive Director of IT Drew Lane regarding a master agreement with CenturyLink — which stands to cost the district $208,597.00 over a three-year period — was approved unanimously by the board in wake of technical difficulties with district phone usage. Several “outages” occurred in August, but only difficulties with incoming calls were present. 

“We noticed this in August, we had three days of outage in the school district before school began,” SMSD Deputy Superintendent Dr. Rick Atha said at the meeting. “Had that outage come in September or October, it would have been devastating to the district.” 

The next board meeting is set to take place Nov. 25 at the Center for Academic Achievement.