Alisha Jucevic/The Columbian Kristen Molina, left, Anna Stepan, center and JoAnn Delyea, teachers at Illahee Elementary School make signs after the Evergreen Education Association general membership meeting at Evergreen High School in Vancouver on Thursday. As of press time, 96.88 percent of the union's membership had voted in favor of striking.
It’s a common occurrence in the news business: Just when you think you’ve covered every kind of story, a new one comes along.
In this case, I’m talking about covering a widespread teachers’ strike. I am still hopeful that no strikes will occur. But it looks increasingly likely that by the middle of next week, many of Clark County’s 80,000 public education students won’t be attending classes.
Acrimony between educators and school administrators is not an unusual story. In my time in Clark County, I can remember a couple of union strike votes and a district obtaining a court order barring a strike. But it’s been decades since local teachers actually went out on strike.
This year seems different. A lot of money is at stake. To meet the state Supreme Court’s order in the McCleary decision, the Legislature gave out another $1 billion for teachers’ salaries. But there hasn’t been much direction from Olympia, leaving school districts and their teachers with what in some cases are widely divergent ideas.
I don’t claim to know how much teachers should be paid or how much districts can afford to spend. My job is to put together a coverage plan. We actually started in the spring when we decided to watch and document what was happening with local pay negotiations, even when the action didn’t rise to the level of a story.
Because we knew the story would be reaching its peak just before school started, back in early July we planned to devote our Sunday, Aug. 19 A1 cover story to the issue. Reporters Katie Gillespie and Adam Littman started actively working the story in early August, getting in touch with sources, learning more about how negotiations work and understanding each side’s bargaining points.
The Sunday story was a bit more challenging than usual because it had a lot of moving pieces. We generally want the reporters and photographers to finish Sunday A1 projects no later than Wednesday, to allow time for copy editing and page and web design. In this case, though, we were making changes through Friday night and would have made more on Saturday had anything changed.
This week brought a lot of follow-up stories. We decided early in the week there would be stories on daily developments, which we call “spot news.” Because a lot of the action happened in the late afternoons and evenings, Katie and Adam changed their work schedules, coming in late or taking long midday breaks, so they would be able to quickly get the latest news in the paper and online. Katie also contributed an enterprise story looking at whether or not it is legal for teachers to strike.
On Wednesday, we met with a larger newsroom group including our news, web and photo editors to plan our coverage for the weekend and into next week. You can expect to see another enterprise story and a spot news roundup on the front page of this Sunday’s Columbian. In addition, we made plans to cover what could become all-night negotiations on Monday and the first strikes early Tuesday morning. It’s fair to say that after missing supper this week, Katie and Adam might not be getting much sleep next week.
I am sure that the Portland media, particularly the TV stations, will be on hand if any of our local teachers strike. But we think that by planning early, making contacts, understanding the issues and putting in the hours, our coverage will be the best. Even if the story is new to us.
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