Today, Denver Classroom Teachers Association members are voting on whether or not to authorize a walkout of Denver Public Schools—starting tomorrow. While Denver teachers and management agree that teachers need a considerably better base salary, they disagree on the amount. As of last week, negotiations seem to have stalled, and possibly gotten worse, with management beginning to publicly state numbers that the union claimed misrepresent the negotiating process.
Now, on the potential eve of a work stoppage that will affect students, 9 News in Colorado reports that Department of Public Schools superintendent Susana Cordova had this amazingly dark bit of poetry to speak into a microphone.
“We’ve got a whole group of federal employees who’ve been furloughed who are not working or not getting paid,” she said. “So we have attended some of the work events where folks are looking to pick up extra cash.”
Are they making Trump and Senate Majority Leader’s Mitch McConnell’s lemons turn into lemonade for labor-busting middle management types? It’s important to note that part of what makes this particularly insidious is the combination of using some charitable angle around the government shutdown to degrade the work that public school teachers do by saying that any person that has been gainfully employed can be a teacher—if they need some money.
I hope Ms. Cordova has nightmares about that statement.