Detroit Teachers Continue to Strike, Ignoring Judge’s Orders

Most of Detroit’s 10,500 teachers defied a judge’s order to go back to work Thursday, and picketed noisily outside schools.

Negotiations to end the 3 1/2-week-long strike resumed.

Teachers said they were willing to stay on the picket line as long as it takes to win a contract, even though school was to have started Aug. 31. The strike has prolonged summer vacation for Detroit’s 168,000 students.

“We need to recall the board,” Terry Bagwell, one of about 30 teachers marching outside George Washington Stark Elementary School, said, adding that she believed the teachers would prevail. “This is a union town.”

Wayne County Circuit Judge Robert Colombo Jr. on Tuesday ordered the teachers to return to work under a contract that expired in June.

The Detroit Federation of Teachers and schools began bargaining Thursday morning for the first time since Sunday, schools spokesman Steve Wasko said.

The sides disagree over wages and the rules of “empowerment,” a plan that would put more authority and autonomy in individual schools. The city already has some schools operating under the plan, where teachers, students and principals together work out their schools’ problems and needs.

The teachers also have asked for an 8% raise; the district offered a 3% bonus tied to teachers’ attendance at staff workshops and seminars. Detroit’s teachers with a bachelor’s degree start at $27,000 a year, earning $41,000 after 10 years.

Wasko said school officials would consider going back to the judge to seek a contempt-of-court order. If found in contempt, the striking teachers could be jailed.

In 1973, Detroit teachers ignored a similar court order. While no strikers were jailed, the union was assessed fines that eventually totaled $209,000, plus $2.5 million in damages. Those fines were forgiven after the strike was settled in mid-October.

Some of the teachers who generally support the strike expressed uncertainty about the empowerment plan.

“It’s just the general fuzziness of what empowerment means,” said Dennis Kevonian, an English teacher at Finney High School who was on the picket line.