Despite the morose economy and continued threat of a second recessionary dip, the newly-elected president of the local teachers’ union is upbeat about his two-year mandate.

Don Johnston, 44, has been a teacher for more than 20 years and has worked in Newberg for more than 15. Originally from Michigan, Johnston said that after graduating from college he packed his car and started touring the country. He went as far as Texas before running out of money.
For 18 months he worked as a social worker in Houston before he decided to use his teaching credentials. “I called the local school district on a Tuesday and on a Thursday I was in a classroom,” he said. Also present with him were four other teachers and two armed policemen.

He later taught in inner-city Houston what was then called a self-contained, severely emotionally disturbed class at a school the hallway of which was a quarter-mile long from one end to the other.

“That was a bizarre experience as well,” he said.

Eventually he and his wife moved to Newberg because as public school teachers in Houston they could no more afford to live in a neighborhood that had good schools than send their kids to private school.

“It’s an important time to do it,” Johnston said of his term as union president. “I think it would be boring if you were doing it and there was nothing to do.”

He’s unlikely to be disappointed, as the Newberg Education Association is in the middle of contract negotiations with the school district at a time of dwindling public budgets.

Yet teachers in Newberg are fortunate, Johnston said, as the community has been supportive of education. He pointed to the voters’ approval of a $27 million bond in May as one of the latest signs of that support. Other school districts in Oregon tried to pass bonds last spring and failed.
The issues facing the NEA are similar to those faced by teachers unions across the country. “It’s just been total bloodshed,” Johnston said of his profession. Thousands of teaching jobs have been slashed and he wonders about the effects of such drastic layoffs as political leaders point to education as a means to end the current recession while state and federal governments reduce funding for education.

Johnston sees the unions’ job as representing the middle class and, with only about 16 percent of the American work force involved in unions, he thinks that it’s no wonder the middle class is shrinking.

“We’ve lived a pretty moderate, conservative life,” he said of himself and his wife, yet sending their children to a state university means incurring large debts, “and I think that that’s wrong. I don’t know of anybody who can afford to send their kids to school without incurring a ton of debt.”

Economic matters don’t stop with sending kids to college. Johnston said that historically teachers knew they wouldn’t get rich but expected a stable retirement. Not anymore, he said. Colleagues in their 60s who are retiring “are all going out and finding another job or they’re coming back and subbing for the school district just so that they can pay for insurance.”

Also on the table are changes in the way teachers are evaluated, which Johnston said is part of the cycle of education, where every five years or so change is deemed necessary. While Johnston encourages the use of data, he pointed out that teachers have no control over which kids they’re assigned or over the other 23 hours in a student’s day. He said his main concern is that whatever data is used, it would be used consistently to compare teachers.

“Personally I think it’s virtually impossible,” he said.

To those who doubt the relevancy of unions’ in today’s workplace or view some of their demands as unrealistic, Johnston said that “back when unions began asking for a five-day work week it was seen as unrealistic.” He said that the eight-hour work day faced the same argumentation. “These are the things unions are responsible for.”