The St. Paul teacher strike ended Friday, March 13 with educators going back to school at 1 p.m. Students did not have to report to school Friday.
Claudia Lundgren, a St. Thomas student and student-teacher at Central High School, planned a presentation to work toward her teaching license for Tuesday, March 10, but the St. Paul Federation of Educators began their strike Tuesday, pausing her progress.
The Federation agreed on Feb. 20 that they would strike if a deal was not reached with the St. Paul School District over more mental health support, English language learner professionals and special education professionals. A tentative contract agreement was reached early Friday.
The St. Paul Federation of Educators said the agreement includes more social workers, nurses, intervention specialist, psychologist and multilingual staff.
When school was not in session, Lundgren was unable to complete the work for licensure. The edTPA requires Lundgren’s work, which includes filming herself teaching her own lesson plan, to be completed by April 5.
“We are required to record lessons and assess assignments we give the students,” Lundgren said. “You can’t do that if you don’t have school.”
Members of the community, alongside the teachers, voiced their support for hiring changes across the district.
“A common misconception is that people strike because they want more money and that is not the heart of the matter here,” said Holly Magner, a science specialist at Four Seasons Elementary. “We want support in the form of more staff because we know what the students need.”
Magner said the schools need more counselors and special-ed teachers because the current faculty’s workload is too much.
The American Counseling Association recommends that the student to counselor ratio should be 250-to-1.
“Our school is pushing almost 500 students and we have one counselor,” Magner said. “We used to have a full-time nurse, then for a while we had one part-time nurse, and how do you tell a kid, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, you can’t have an asthma attack today. The nurse isn’t in the office. Best of luck, friend, just sit down and breathe slowly.’”
Lundgren said the two teachers she works with were not in support of the strike, but they were in support of the cause.
“They don’t want kids to be out of school because then the kids aren’t getting the meals they want and they could be getting in trouble,” Lundgren said.
“Our students are brilliant, they’re awesome and they deserve better from us,” Magner said. “The children in our program are going to run this world for us. We should invest in them now.”
Joey Swanson can be reached at swan5350@stthomas.edu.
Maddie Peters and Mae Macfarlane contributed to this report.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.