City teachers strike looming

Youngstown starts classes Wednesday; board meets today

YOUNGSTOWN -- Members of the Youngstown Education Association voted to strike after a 40-minute voting session Monday evening.

Talks between Youngstown City School District officials and the YEA union broke off Monday morning after only 90 minutes. The union met Monday at 5 p.m. at Mill Creek Community Center and voted "overwhelmingly" in favor of a strike.

Spokesman Jim Courim said he hopes the strike vote is a wake-up call for the school board.

"My hope is the district looks at this and says 'Maybe we need to get to the table and hammer out a deal,'" he said. "They have one more opportunity tomorrow (today). The ball is in their court. Unfortunately, today they took their ball and went home."

The YCSD board has a regular meeting at 4:30 p.m. today at Choffin Career and Technical Center. Courim said he hopes the board will act to avert the strike, but if no contract is in place by 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, teachers will be on the picket lines on the day students are supposed to begin the school year.

After the two sides met for four-and-a-half hours Friday at Chaney High School, YEA issued a news release criticizing the district for not including "the full voice and input of Youngstown's teachers in the learning conditions of Youngstown's students."

Courim said it's this policy dispute, and not wages, that has kept contract negotiations from advancing toward a resolution ahead of the school year's scheduled start Wednesday.

At 9 a.m. Monday, the two sides met again at Chaney. But Courim said the board made one offer and quickly walked away from the table. The meeting ended at 10:30 a.m.

Courim said teachers want to be part of creating a better ecosystem for students to learn. T-shirts worn by many of the members attending Monday's meeting read: "Our working conditions are students' learning conditions."

"We understand our students and how they best learn," Courim said. "We just want a voice at the table to create that safe and distraction-free learning environment for our students, to have a say in how they learn and what they're learning."

The union held a rally Saturday to encourage member support for Monday's vote.

"We've never been to this point before. A lot of that was because of House Bill 70," Courim said. "But today, we do have the ability to negotiate language because we're no longer under HB 70. So, it's new to a lot of us. We have a lot of young teachers in there and it's a brand new experience for them, so it's important for us to stick together and stay united."

HB 70 put the Youngstown, Lorain and East Cleveland school districts under state control. The districts no longer had a superintendent, but a chief executive officer who had complete academic and financial control over the districts and their elected school boards.

No one from the district responded to a request for comment by press time.

The Youngstown Education Association is a local affiliate of the Ohio Education Association. It is comprised of approximately 450 members, including classroom teachers, counselors, librarians, psychologists, visiting teachers, home school visitors, Specific Learning Disability tutors, speech and hearing therapists, mobility instructors, physical therapist specialists, occupational therapists and curriculum specialists.