This is Rori Abernethy … OEA webmaster and OHS math teacher. I just checked in and saw this post here.

Thanks Katy for the OEA website plug and thanks to people who commented about their challenges with the OEA meeting and voting process. I will be looking into alternatives using technology.

My own experience (parent of a child with autism) was that our family’s income was too high to qualify for most services. But teachers don’t get paid what I do, so I offered the thought.

Our family has had much more help and support from the Department of Rehabilitation, DOR, and that’s also worth trying I think. Although DOR is all about getting people into jobs and elderly, disabled parents aren’t likely to become employable, so they probably don’t qualify.

I do have to wonder, though, if one has to care for elderly or disabled family member, and one has no back-up support whatsoever, how does one manage to hold a job, go grocery shopping, etc? It’s puzzling.

“What about our colleagues who take care of their parents and have no one else to do so? ”

I would humbly suggest that someone who is taking care of aging parents (or another family member with physical or mental challenges) check with the nearest Regional Center and ask about respite care. All care-givers need breaks to rest and recharge, and Regional Centers will help find alternate care-givers, and depending on income, they’ll reimburse the costs.

Hope that helps!

We all make choices and we can all make any sort of excuse to justify those choices. I used to live in San Francisco and I STILL went to those meetings. If voting matters to you, then you make time to make it happen. When we have parent conferences or participate in after school activities, we make arrangements to cover any conflicts that may occur.

But then, that seems to be the only way we add revenue these days, that and parking tickets!

Personally, I am not against site-based votes or even online votes. I was just trying to establish that there was a history to these things and OEA didn’t start it, as was implied by some above. I can see arguments for both sides.

And while you may not have said it, many have implied that more “active” union members are making policy and running roughshod over the opinions of an alleged “silent majority.” In the spring, some folks on here even said they were scared to go to the meeting to speak or even vote against the strike authorization. The implication was clear: those who went to the meetings were somehow more loony-tunes than those who didn’t. It was with this background that I responded to you.

Bottom line is we are damned if we do strike, damned if we don’t. The district has not even offered us a face-saving solution. Tough times, tough choice.

On the bigger picture, I think it is interesting that nobody makes the case that spending MORE on education is a perfectly acceptable response to economic problems because a) it leads to a more competitive workforce in a global environment, b) school employees are debt-ridden, lower-middle class folks who immediately dump that money back into the community as a stimulus, and c) where kids fall through the cracks because of lack of support in school they become huge burdens on the society/state going forward as addicts, criminals, prisoners, teen parents and homeless people.

Also, the problem with Measure L had very little to do with the fact that some of the money went to charters (however ill concieved charters are). It was an unfair taxation. I, as a Oakland homeowner and teacher who is barely making it month to month, pays the same as Bank of America. The other problem with Measure L was that the makers slipped in the word ‘effective’ in reference to teachers without defining what that word meant in the context of teaching, opening the door to the idea of merit pay. Merit pay may sound great to the average joe but if your kid isn’t pulling his weight in my class, I can’t fire him. See, teaching really doesn’t fit the business model. It shouldn’t take a Kindergarten teacher to tell you a square peg doesn’t fit in a round hole.