‘Are You Going to Strike, Mrs. Kazmin?’ : Schools: A walkout tells students one thing, bowing to budgetary humiliation another. There’s no ‘right’ answer.

At my secondary magnet school, I teach more than 200 students, divided among six math classes and a homeroom. My students come from all over the Los Angeles Unified School District.

They are wonderful young people, full of energy and hope. They are my constituents, my students and my friends. I teach them mathematics and encourage them to do the very best they can so they might climb through the school system successfully and go on to college. And they respond, doing homework, concentrating on new concepts, mastering algebra.

Our country’s greatest hope is in these young people and the future that a good education should promise them. But my school, like all in Los Angeles Unified, is in serious trouble. The district wants to cut teachers’ salaries by 12% this year, reduce our health benefits and make no promises about next year. My students ask, “Are you going to strike, Mrs. Kazmin?” What am I to say? For years I taught at a private school where teachers felt they had no rights--we were paid at the whim of a headmaster according to what he thought we needed.

Now I am represented by a union that uses some pretty strong tactics in order to protect teachers’ rights to earn a decent wage. (My son and I once calculated that a major-league pitcher earned as much pitching seven innings as I earned teaching an entire school year.)

How do I answer my students, when I don’t even know whether or not we should strike? I am reminded of Vietnam--destroying something in order to save it. Each colleague I speak to has a different perspective; it’s not an easy issue.

To refuse to strike is to announce that teachers--those very people entrusted by society to empower our children--are themselves powerless. To refuse to strike is to admit that those who travel the road of study, hard work and professional status can be knocked down with impunity. To accept humiliating pay cuts is to send a message to young people everywhere that their education doesn’t have a high priority in this society.

But to strike and shut down the educational process is to tell students that our paychecks are more important than their progress. It is to attack their haven in our troubled city--a familiar school and routine, their classmates and teachers who care. It is to pile another concern onto their shoulders--how will this disruption affect their future opportunities? A strike makes the statement that teachers are the vital element in the education process and must be treated accordingly. But it tarnishes our image even as it seeks to protect us. In trying to safeguard the teaching profession for tomorrow’s students and teachers, we harm today’s.

How many students will ask me whether I am going on strike? How many faculty friends will choose that course of action? What will be the outcome of our decision? What is the right thing to do? And how did our public schools become a truly endangered species? This teacher has no answers to these questions.