After the mass mobilization of teachers in West Virginia that moved the lawmakers to action for the overdue pay raise, teachers in Arizona and Oklahoma are rising up to address the issue of low wages and underfunded schools.
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Oklahoma Public Employees Association board of directors said the if the lawmakers won't approve over US$213 million in state employee pay raises, the teachers will walk-out, according to the Hill. Oklahoma state employees on Saturday said they would join the planned teachers strike scheduled for April 2.
Alicia Priest, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, a professional collective representing nearly 35,000 educators in the state, told Vox, "Everything we have tried has failed ... What [happened] in West Virginia is giving teachers hope, myself included, that we can be change agents."
The Oklahoma Public Employees Association's communications director, Tom Dunning, said: "We are going to have to design different plans for different types of (a state agency) work sites, and that's what we are going to be doing over the next week," the Hill reported.
The Oklahoma teachers' collective petitioned and created a Facebook group to mobilize teachers in the state. The Facebook group “Oklahoma Teacher Walkout – The Time Is Now!" has, so far, garnered a little over 50,000 members.
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In an online petition, the Oklahoma educators demanded better and higher pay to retain current teachers. "Teachers in Oklahoma need a raise of $10,000 per year to be competitive regionally. Our neighbor states are paying much more and luring away our best talent. Current compensation levels eliminate new college graduates entering the profession," the petition read.
"Frustration levels are high, so a strike is not a touchy word anymore," Molly Jaynes, an Oklahoma City teacher told KTUL, a local Oklahoma news channel. "I think we have surpassed the point of conversations, and I don't think that there's anything the legislators have provided us recently to give us any sort of hope that they're going to take actual actions this time."
In Arizona, thousands of teachers showed up wearing red to schools in solidarity to show their frustration with the government and lack of labor laws. "West Virginia teachers walked out — and they make more than us," a teacher said at a school board meeting on February 28 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Vox reported.