Defend Kentucky Teachers Against State Intimidation

Wayne Lewis

In the Wake of Teacher Intimidation, It's Time For Wayne Lewis and the Kentucky Board of Education to Resign

In the wake of school closures this week to protest Frankfort lawmakers' continuing attacks on public education, it appears that Kentucky Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis is resorting to intimidation to go after teachers who dare protest the attempts to privatize education that Lewis has been fighting to make happen for years.  

Lewis is asking schools for lists of names of teachers who called in sick and any documentation from their physicians indicating they are sick.

It's unclear what right Lewis has to do this, or what he could do with the information once he got it.  Since school was cancelled, technically, no teacher was absent that day.  Additionally, I can't imagine that Lewis has any right to request doctor's notes from people he doesn't directly manage. 

Lewis, Hal Heiner, Matt Bevin, Gary Houchens, and other members of our state Board of Education have been gunning for teachers and their unions for close to a decade. Lewis, Houchens, and Heiner have been tied at the hip for years working to privatize public education and support the larger agenda to destroy government institutions pushed by people like the Koch brothers from Kansas.   The goal is to divert public funds to private education, preferably religious schools, by finding every means possible to criticize public education while pulling the rug out from under our schools at the same time.

Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis was a teacher for less than 5 years at a total of 3 different schools 10 years ago. That he left the profession so soon after job hopping so much should have been a red flag that he wasn’t cut out to be one of the people he pretends to lead today.

It’s time the people of this state call on Wayne Lewis and the entire Bevin appointed state board of education to resign. They’re an embarrassment to the state and the education profession.

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Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

The above is a short report from Louisville School Beat, an online publication aimed at providing news and information on the Jefferson County school system in Louisville KY. As we reported earlier, schools were shut down again yesterday and the political representatives of the education privatizers are shifting their focus to intimidation and repression of teachers that stayed off work to fight for decent education for working class people.

Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis sent Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Marty Pollio an email requesting the names of all teachers that called in sick on dates during which sickouts took place, beginning with the first on Feb. 28. See the copy of the email included here. He’s worried about state law being violated and says that state law gives him the power to do this. There have been work stoppages in numerous school districts and in one of them six such stoppages. 

While a Jefferson County Teachers Association spokesperson has said that the JCTA will “provide legal representation to any union member facing discipline.” history, past and present teaches us that working people cannot rely on the courts to protect us from the savagery of the market and predatory capital which is what is happening here. So called “friends” of labor and working people have been on the offensive against public education at the university level as well through increased fees and closing schools like Obama’s friend Rahm Emanuel in Chicago and Garcetti in Los Angeles and we will see more with Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.

What happens in these struggles affects all of us and our families. With close to 17 million workers in unions if we include the NEA that represents teachers and other educators, we have the power to drive back this war against those dedicated people who work in some of the worst conditions. The private sector wants to get its dirty little hands on public education and all of us we owe it to our children and teachers as fellow workers to stop them.

The Kentucky school shutdowns and some of the walk outs were opposed in a deal between the official union leadership and the state and the teachers correctly refused to abide by a weak deal, the same way the Virginia teachers did last year. The state and the political representatives in both parties will try to sow division between the teachers and the community, the urban and the rural communities and always between whites and people of color.  Politicians as well as the present pro-market heads of organized labor will also try to halt and tame this movement, put the genie back in the bottle. This must not be allowed to happen or we will all lose.

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