Education Support Professionals
They are the………
- School bus driver who greets the students with a warm hello and delivers them safely to school
- Office worker and clerical staff who maintain the student records and assist all faculty and staff
- Cafeteria worker who gives the students a healthy meal
- Instructional Assistant who provides additional support to the students in the classroom
- School nurse who comforts and take care of the injured or sick student
- Technology specialist who wires the schools and services the computers
- Custodian who works to keep the schools environment safe and clean
- Security professional who support to protect the students and staff
- Building engineer who support to maintain the operation of the buildings
IT’S ALL ABOUT RESPECT
By Ric Clark, Western Transportation
Let’s see a show of hands: Raise your hand if you think that driving a school bus might be a hard job. OK, that’s just about everybody. OK, keep your hand up if you actually are a school bus driver for Prince William County. OK, that counts most of you out, but there are still several hundred hands in the air. How ‘bout, how many of you bus drivers really enjoy your job, most of the time? Uh, huh; I saw a few hands go down, but most of you must really like driving your students to & from school every day, even on rainy days & even when some of them get frisky and act up a little. How many of you believe you bear a tremendous responsibility for keeping those students safe during those 360+ trips each school year? All of your hands are still up—good. How many of you felt you had someone else to turn to when you couldn’t get satisfaction when you raised an issue? Now how many of those drivers are members of PWEA? Good; I see; many of you still have your hands up. Those who just lowered their hands must be able to afford their own legal assistance, or something else equally valuable. Good for you. But as we can all see, the way to go for most of us is to become dues-paying members of the union which represents not just teachers, but also education support professionals, such as ourselves, and the cost per pay is well worth it whenever we need that extra push to improve our working conditions, pay, and benefits. Why should you join PWEA, VEA & NEA? PWEA assisted and supported the bus driver members who went before the school board on June 15, at its last meeting of the 2010-11 school year to talk about RESPECT. Our president, Bonnie Klakowicz, spoke to the same board on our behalf at the beginning of the school year, explaining that there were serious problems within transportation services. There was virtually no follow-up by the board after her initial presentation, and things seemed the same or worse to PWEA transportation members. So, with the assistance of PWEA and VEA staff and advice and encouragement from PWEA board members, several bus driver members came forward to speak to the school board again at the end of last school year. We each told our personal stories of unsafe and unfair practices which we had experienced, and the dissatisfaction we all felt as our managers, in essence, just slammed their “open-doors” in our face when we came to them for help. We all talked about the lack of RESPECT! Others told us they wanted to speak and stand with us, but they were genuinely afraid for their job security if they had done so. The board seemed to listen.
Those of us who brought our concerns to the board have met with Rae Darlington, the Deputy Superintendent, in August, and she politely and attentively listened to details about the concerns we raised to the Board and Dr. Walts. We hope our concerns are addressed in the professional manner we all expect in our world-class school system. We are encouraged to notice small improvements in the short-duration working environment we find ourselves in since June 15th, and our meeting with the Deputy Superintendent. As I said in my 3-minute speech to the board, “I am very thankful for the Prince William Education Association, which is our union, and which has helped many individual Education Support Professionals, such as myself, try to work out serious disagreements with our managers when we felt we had exhausted remedies within our transportation chain-of-command.” Without PWEA herding us together and doing their best to meet our needs, by enabling us to exercise our power as a group, we would be just one individual bus driver, with too many complaints, who should just “be quiet and do your job,” or “vote with your feet.”Now PWEA is not some magical power from on high. WE are P[WE]A and the paid professionals who assist us can do just that: assist US, meaning WE have to put our heads together and prioritize our issues, and guess what: if you’re not a member, you’re not helping us resolve Y(OUR) issues. So find ways to invite those not-yet members into the fold, especially those that are complaining “nothing ever gets done.” They can channel their energies into our union’s tried-and-true stand-together organizing ways to make this world a better place, starting with the places where we all work. Like one person told me before deciding to speak to the board about mistreatment, “I got tired of being run-over all the time!”
