Fairfax teachers will bargain for a contract: What it means for schools and what’s next
Employees of Fairfax County Public Schools cast landslide union votes this week, authorizing collective bargaining for the first time in half a century in one of the nation’s largest school districts.
The votes, which came after the pandemic upended schools and after FCPS had to scale back proposed salary increases, empower a union to seek contracts on behalf of 27,500 county teachers and staff members.
Getting to this point required a pair of alliances: one between teaching staff and those on the operational side, and a second between two local unions to form the Fairfax Education Unions. The result is a breakthrough the American Federation of Teachers called “the largest U.S. public sector union victory in 25 years.”
Almost 97 percent of voters in FCPS’s instructional unit — including teachers, counselors and librarians — backed collective bargaining. So did more than 80 percent of voters in the operational unit, which includes bus drivers, cafeteria workers and custodians.
FCPS told The Machine in a statement that it was “pleased to see the process moving forward” for its workers and “glad staff had the opportunity to vote and have their voice heard.”
Here’s what these union moves mean — and what might come next.
How did we get here?
It took a very long wait.
For decades, Virginia was bound by a 1977 state Supreme Court ruling and subsequent law that banned local governments from collective bargaining with their employees. Then-Fairfax County Board Chairman John F. Herrity told The Post at the time that the ruling meant all existing labor contracts with the county and the school board were “null and void.” (“I am assured the county will probably continue to honor the obligations that we’ve entered into the date,” he said.)
Education unions lobbied to overturn that blanket ban, and Gov. Ralph Northam signed a bill in 2020 that did so. The Fairfax school board followed with a resolution last year granting its employees the right for a union to bargain on their behalf.
“That was when our campaign really got going,” said David Walrod, who’s president of the Fairfax County Federation of Teachers and a math and special education teacher at Lake Braddock Secondary School.
He and Leslie Houston, his counterpart atop the Fairfax Education Association, agreed last June to have their unions team up rather than compete. Then came “a lot of internal planning,” a lot of conversations with school-system employees and, starting in December, a lot of gathering signatures, Walrod said.
By the end of April, union leaders felt confident they had the numbers, and they filed for elections. “Starting June 3 until June 10, we were in schools every day,” Walrod said. “We were talking to as many folks as we could. We were getting our leaders to have conversations, and we were making sure folks knew the election was here and they knew how to vote.”
Most FCPS employees didn’t vote, according to Patch. But those who did voted decisively.
What do school employees want in a contract?
Expect a few principal topics to dominate the bargaining table.
One, of course, is pay. It takes FCPS teachers an average of 21 years to save for a down payment on a home, the sixth-longest mark in the country, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality. Rent for a one-bedroom apartment costs a new Fairfax teacher 35 percent of their salary, the NCTQ says, even after cost-of-living raises in recent years. Some operational workers, meanwhile, are making as little as $24,000 a year, Walrod said.
“You have folks who are really dedicating their lives to the students of Fairfax County but then can’t afford to send their own kids there,” said Walrod, who said he opted to “put down roots” outside the county himself.
Another cause will be teachers’ heavy workloads, which the pandemic intensified, contributing to surges in teacher departures. The Fairfax Education Unions may seek to enshrine teachers’ right to weekly planning time, Walrod said, which isn’t always honored.
Workplace safety is a third likely pillar. Bus drivers and instructional assistants have been dealing with increases in student disciplinary and behavioral issues since the pandemic as well, Walrod said.
How might this affect students?
Teachers say better pay and better working conditions will mean better student outcomes, and there’s some data to back that up.
Eunice Han, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Utah, researches teacher unionization. In a 2019 analysis, she and her co-author concluded that “where union effects are found, they are almost universally found to be positive for student performance,” though the impacts can vary by grade and by race.
“What I find is if teachers are less stressed and you pay higher pay for teachers, then it has to have positive impacts on teachers in many different channels,” Han told The Machine in an interview.
That tracks with Walrod’s view. Higher pay helps with staff retention, too, he noted, and better conditions for bus drivers keep students safer.
“All of us are interested in the same thing: We all want to see students succeed,” he said. “Ultimately, the conditions that educators work under are the conditions that students learn under.”
What happens next?
The Fairfax Education Unions are connecting with school-system employees and will form two bargaining committees to seek separate contracts for the instructional and operational units, Walrod said.
“We’re going to be talking to folks all over the district, because we want to make sure that we have a bargaining committee that’s representative of the work that’s being done,” he said.
Sept. 1 is the deadline for union leaders to submit an initial proposal to FCPS. That doesn’t mean there will be a signed contract by then, Walrod said, but “if we want to have a contract in the next year,” that will be the day to hit.
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