Dear fellow members of the Salmon River Teachers' Association:

It is the inherent nature of organizations and communities to conduct business and address issues within their own walls, without bringing those concerns to a larger audience, except as a last resort and not until absolutely necessary. As the president of the Salmon River Teachers’ Association, I am obligated to come forward with the truth about working conditions and the treatment of our Association and its members by the district administration. The members of the SRTA have soldiered on under the current administration for the past five years, tolerating one abuse and slight after another, while remaining doggedly loyal to their students and their profession. The handling of this past Wednesday’s abrupt and unilateral decision to return prematurely to in-person instruction, in the midst of the highest levels of active COVID-19 cases to date, is the latest in a long line of such offenses. These actions have made this disclosure of our situation not only necessary, but urgent.

Every union president wrestles with how much information to divulge to their general membership regarding the state of operations within their districts, because of the very question of morale. The leadership of the SRTA has endeavored to handle the constant flow of labor-management issues with discretion and without unnecessarily burdening our members with the ugly truth about how this district is really being run.

As Dr. Harper so accurately stated in his letter regarding Tuesday’s imminent reopening of the school for in-person instruction, “he made the decision.” Disregarding the District’s own Board policies, this decision was not “developed by the Superintendent in cooperation with affected or interested staff members or lay persons.” In fact, not a single representative of the Association was even given so much as a heads-up to start discussing and planning for concerns regarding this reopening, and yet those concerns are numerous:

• How will this abrupt change affect our students and teachers who had started to settle into routines and schedules for fully remote instruction? (Every experienced educator knows that students do better with consistency and established rituals and routines than they do with constant change.)

• How will additional students switching from remote back to in-person instruction affect classroom seating arrangements, and therefore affect classroom layout, classroom management, and the delivery of instruction? How will the switch to 4-day per week instruction for some students affect this as well?

• What will do done to equalize the workload of remote-only elementary classroom teachers, who will now have classroom sizes of up to 24 students, double and nearly triple the class size of classes taught by their in-person colleagues?

• What do our nurses do about not have adequate PPE supplies to conduct COVID-19 tests or interact with known or potentially positive cases in school?

• Where are the antiseptic wipes that were to be distributed to each classroom, as the current antibacterial wipes do nothing against viruses?

• Why are our members with severe immune-compromising conditions being forced to reapply for reasonable workplace accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act? Why is this happening now while the COVID rates are rising daily? How can the District say, “If they have in-person supervision duties [as any educator would] they’re not going to be allowed to continue working from home as it would be an undue hardship on the District?”

That is disgusting and it is unconscionable to make our most vulnerable educators feel like their obligation to provide in-person supervision, (even though they could provide instruction from a safer, off-site location) is more important than their health. Or that asking to protect themselves during these unprecedented and still-rising levels of risk is an “undue hardship for the District.” This undue hardship, by the way, is based on the voluntary decision by the District administration to return to in-person instruction, when our remote instruction was becoming more effective by the day.

Even as I type this, building-level administrators are trying to figure out how to provide their staff with critical workplace accommodations due to potentially life-threatening immuno-compromising health conditions, because Dr. Harper did not have a clear plan in place for how to proceed. Our members called their building offices, got referred to the business office, and then were redirected right back to their immediate supervisors, because there was not a plan for handling this at the district level from the outset.

This is not something that our members should have to worry about, especially since the apparent decision-making process is a convoluted matter of the employee discussing their request with their immediate supervisor, the immediate supervisor bringing the request for an accommodation to the superintendent, the superintendent bringing the request to the District’s lawyer for a determination on whether the request constitutes and “undue hardship” for the District, the lawyer returning that determination to the superintendent, back down eventually to the employee, who will then either have to accept the District’s response or decide if they need to take a medical leave of absence from work. How long will this drawn-out process take before our members have adequate accommodations, if at all?

Dr. Harper did not even announce to the employees of this school that they would need to re-apply for workplace accommodations under the Americans With Disabilities Act, and, apparently, we were expected to infer all of that from the One-Call message that we received last Wednesday night. That call, incidentally, was the first mention of such an unexpected and abrupt shift. These are people’s lives that we’re talking about; educational gains do not outweigh health risks, and these essential accommodations should not be an afterthought.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 closure of the schools in March, the SRTA has attempted to proactively engage the District in negotiations through the superintendent, for the purposes of negotiating plans and agreements to address these many issues. Our efforts to discuss matters with the District administration have led us to be stonewalled, ignored, and delayed until the last possible moment, at which point we didn’t enter into direct negotiations, but indirectly through our NYSUT labor relations specialist and the District’s lawyer.

This was the case in the spring, it continued through the summer with the toothless and micromanaged reopening planning committees, and it has reached new depths this fall. Our negotiations committee has attempted to bargain in good faith with the District about (among many other things) the effects of substantial increases to our workload due to pandemic-related operations, only to have the District administration engage in highly questionable negotiations tactics.

These have included: interference in union representation and communications; questioning the truth of our representatives’ conveyance of our own members’ concerns; conducting questionable wants and needs surveys of our members, which resulted in our members getting questioned about their survey responses; lying to our negotiations committee about our members’ responses to this bogus survey; and finally, speaking publicly at a Board meeting, where Dr. Harper repeatedly pushed the District’s position on an open negotiations issue – specifically and repeatedly insisting in an open Board meeting that elementary students “must” receive instruction five days per week to make improvements. He made this public claim while we have been actively attempting to negotiate Wednesdays as planning, preparation and communication time for remote-instructions elementary teachers as a fair and reasonable adjustment, the same as has been afforded our secondary teachers, and the teachers of most other surrounding districts.

If anyone is unclear about the acceptability of such a public statement, let me be clear: you do not speak publicly about active negotiations issues. It was a blatant breach of long-established etiquette and an understanding that has been mutually observed by both labor and management since organized labor and bargaining began.

The morale that remains for many Salmon River employees exists only because of the support of their colleagues and the appreciation of our students and their families. I can’t begin to count how many times veteran members have regretfully admitted, “This used to be a happy place to work;” “We used to come to work and have fun;” “This used to feel like a big family, and now it just feels like a job.” For these amazing professionals, they don’t understand why things have to be the way they are here, day in, day out. And the truth is, things don’t have to be this way. But when you have to fight year after year just to keep the few little perks that you have from being stripped away, morale becomes a luxury.

What’s even worse this year is that the mentality of so many employees has moved beyond low morale. An ever-increasing number of our educators come to school with a shell-shocked siege mentality, going through the day with a defensive wall up and wondering what little surprise is going to be sprung upon them next. This latest reopening maneuver has further engrained that mindset in the collective psyche of our workforce.

When the District responded a couple of years ago with their “morale committees,” which quietly disappeared after accomplishing few meaningful or lasting changes across the district, the response on the management side of the table on more than one occasion was “We’re all in charge of our own morale.” Yes, that’s an actual quote.

Such absurd and detached statements are indicative of the District’s overall disposition towards the social, emotional, and mental well-being of its employees. Our students are afforded every safeguard, support network, and gentle approach possible, as they should be. So how come our employees deserve anything less?

I must be clear that we have administrators, especially at the building level, who have advocated for the professional and overall wellness needs of the staff in their buildings. And of course, no administrator is going to get along with all of their staff, all of the time, in any district. But what administrative support our members have received has been found primarily at the building level.

The Salmon River Central School District is not moving in the right direction. We have lost, by last count, thirty-five teachers who have resigned from Salmon River to teach elsewhere under our current district administration. Anyone who tells you that they all left just to be closer to home is either lying or delusional, and I will tell you that this number shocks and appalls my fellow presidents from the surrounding North Country locals. This quantity of defections is unheard of elsewhere. People used to migrate to the North Country and settle here permanently to teach at Salmon River. People used to take jobs here despite living an hour or more away and spend 30 years commuting such distances.

Such people are now few and far between, and those few consist of an ever-shrinking number of veterans.

Data logs, communication logs, AIS logs, weekly lesson plans submitted and critiqued, Google Classrooms and daily schedules scrutinized, and reporting minutes of faculty meetings have replaced cheery banter, birthday celebrations for students, fun field trips, and countless other activities that kept employee morale high and made school fun for kids. We have become entrenched in surviving a “gotcha” environment, where staff (and our building administrators, as well) are scrutinized by Big Brother rather than celebrated, appreciated, and understood. Accountability and responsibility for students has been shifted to the teacher, by asking our members “So what are you going to do to make this student pass?” and “What did you do to set this student off and initiate their inappropriate behavior?” or the ever-popular “How many times have you called home to speak the parents about this?” And the emphasis on the importance of state test results looms over every building, every day, like an invisible anvil ready to drop on us at any moment.

When our members have filed harassment complaints regarding student comments in Zoom meetings – comments that are vulgar, racist, sexist, or even attempt to incite suicide of our members, the District has responded, repeatedly, that such behavior isn’t harassment. The District’s responses in several cases didn’t convey an air of sympathy for what happened to our members, and has even gone so far as to blame our members for allowing such actions to take place.

The District administration’s actions are even more reprehensible and sickening than the initial offenses, because the District is supposed to have our backs. It is supposed to stand up for us, and yet Dr. Harper has now attempted to claim – falsely – that SRTA members don’t even have the right to bring union representation with them because doesn’t want our members to be able to advocate for themselves. Although by past practice, we always have and we always will exercise that right, especially when our members risk being handed a response to their harassment claim that actually blames the victim for the very attack made against them.

However, when the superintendent decided to prematurely reopen our school for in-person instruction, only five days after sending us a directive in an email to “not congregate in any number,” as we continued to be discouraged from visiting District offices in person because it’s not safe, and only a week after the governor insisted that only members of the same household gather for the holidays, we’re somehow surprised. We’re somehow shocked that the District administration would make such a decision to have hundreds of students, from hundreds of households, gather together in the same rooms all day long, even as the number of active COVID-19 cases reaches unprecedented levels in both Franklin and St. Lawrence Counties, all with the potential for being quarantined – or even gravely ill – leading right into the holidays.

To quote one of our members after the announcement to re-open, “There are two words that I never want to hear our superintendent say again: teamwork and transparency. Because we’re given neither.” I couldn’t agree more.

Shame on us for being shocked. And shame on us further still if we do and say nothing. This is our wake-up call and our call to action. In the coming days, the Association will be sharing additional information regarding the disturbing state of affairs in our school. The time has come to speak truth to power, and to reclaim our school as a place of learning, happiness, fun, and respect for both educators and students alike, and where our members see a home and a family in Salmon River that will welcome them for decades to come.

I encourage all of our members to reach out to your union representatives if you have any concerns at all, and I welcome a healthy discourse with the members of Board of Education, as we prepare to make some long-awaited and meaningful improvements to our Salmon River community.

I wish the best of luck to all of you. Be safe, be careful, and look out for one another. Together, we will get through this and make our school a better place.

In solidarity,

Adam Schrader

President, SRTA