Public schools for more than two-thirds of Oklahoma’s 700,000 students closed Monday because of teacher walkouts that are expected to extend through Tuesday.
The striking teachers are demanding higher salaries and a larger budget, arguing that recently passed pay raises averaging more than $6,000 are not enough.
“As a school counselor, it is so important to me that we meet the needs of the whole child and that means fully funding our schools,” tweeted Sarah Kirk, a Norman school counselor, one of thousands of teachers who protested at the state capitol Monday.
The walkouts came three days after the legislature approved the pay raises, part of an additional $50 million in education spending. “Teachers, your stories have been heard at the Capitol and across the nation. These gains are the result of your fight for kids,” State Superintendent of Schools Joy Hofmeister said in a statement Friday.
State lawmakers have approved nearly $450 million in new taxes and revenue to help fund teachers’ pay and education since March. The Oklahoma Education Association has called for $600 million, including raises of $10,000 for its members, $4,000 more than what they have already received, as well as other funding.
Monday’s walkout was part of an effort by the teachers union to get Republican Gov. Mary Fallin to veto a bill that would repeal a tax on hotel and motel stays and to support legislation to limit exemptions on capital gains taxes and to redirect the revenue in both cases to education. The twin demands would free up an estimated additional $150 million in funding, the union argued.
Fallin has resisted the pressure. On Saturday she re-tweeted a newspaper op-ed that called the teachers “Intoxicated by their own demands,” adding her own comment that “the facts are important in this ongoing situation.”
