The public school systems in Portland, Oregon and several other local communities have announced they will shut down on Wednesday, May 8, due to a teacher walk out organized by the Oregon Education Association. The action is supported by the state’s informal #RedforEd teachers groups.
The Oregonian reported that “Portland, North Clackamas and Gresham-Barlow schools told families this week they will cancel class on May 8 due to a planned statewide teacher walkout over school funding.”
The Oregon State Legislature, which is controlled by Democrats, is considering a plan to spend as much as “$1 billion a year of new business taxes [for] early childhood programs and K-12 schools.”
Teachers and the unions, however, appear to be unsatisfied, as The Oregonian noted:
Still, teachers union leaders planning the rally have not indicated they see less need for an unprecedented statewide walkout than they did earlier in the session when plans to boost school funding were more nebulous.
John Larson, president of the Oregon Education Association, said in a statement that the walkout is intended to “ensure that legislators invest in schools this year” rather than “kicking the can down the road, because students are suffering in the meantime. Lawmakers been close to making big investments in years past, too, and haven’t been successful. We’ve been talking about increasing school funding for quite literally my entire career.”
On May 8, Larson predicted, “tens of thousands of educators, public school families, and other supporters (will) make sure legislators know it’s time to invest in students.”
Teachers in several other states around the country, including North Carolina, South Carolina, and Arizona, will be holding walk outs or similar actions one week earlier, on May 1, May Day, demanding more money for schools and teacher pay from their local state legislatures.
The May 8 walk outs are the most recent escalation of teacher activism in Oregon.
Last month, a number of local #RedforEd groups, in cooperation with the Oregon Education Association, staged “walk ins” at local school board events to pressure school boards to increase funding for teacher pay and other school expenditures.
❤️ #redfored #orleg pic.twitter.com/1bnk1XoXc8
— OEA (@oregoneducation) April 25, 2019
As Breitbart News reported in February:
A well-funded and subversive leftist movement of teachers in the United States threatens to tilt the political balance nationwide in the direction of Democrats across the country as Republicans barely hang on in key states that they need to hold for President Donald Trump to win re-election and for Republicans to have a shot at retaking the House and holding onto their Senate majority.
This teachers union effort, called #RedforEd, has its roots in the very same socialism that President Trump vowed in his 2019 State of the Union address to stop, and it began in its current form in early 2018 in a far-flung corner of the country before spreading nationally. Its stated goals–higher teacher pay and better education conditions–are overshadowed by a more malevolent political agenda: a leftist Democrat uprising designed to flip purple or red states to blue, using the might of a significant part of the education system as its lever.
Earlier this month, KDRV of Medford, Oregon reported that “Today state educators will take action to support funding Oregon schools as part of the #RedforEd movement. There will be a group today in Medford on different overpasses.”
In February, the Woodburn Independent reported:
A group of educators and their family members gathered in the rear parking lot at Woodburn’s French Prairie Middle School on Presidents Day morning where they boarded a bus destined to join thousands of others in a “Sea of Red for Ed.”
“March for Our Students,” a rally at the Oregon State Capitol in Salem, reportedly drew nearly 5,000 participants statewide with aims to encourage the state legislature to fully fund education. Many donned red garb, symbolizing a national #RedforEd movement. . .
Oregon’s rally was a piece of a national drive spirited by the National Education Association and executed by state and regional associations, such as the Woodburn Education Association.
The May 8 rally at the State Capitol in Salem, Oregon is hosted by the Oregon Education Association.
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