St. Valentine’s Day Massacre: The murder of seven people as part of Prohibition-era Chicago gang warfare in 1929.
St. Patrick’s Day Massacre: Idaho Gov. Butch Otter’s 2011 signing of a bill to restrict collective bargaining and silence teachers’ voices in their jobs.
This week signaled the end of an era in Idaho education as Gov. Otter quietly signed Senate Bills 1108 and 1110 on Thursday. State Superintendent Tom Luna introduced S1108 to end 40 years of productive collective bargaining and teachers’ due process protections, put educators at risk of layoffs well into the school year, allow school districts to unilaterally cut school employee pay and benefits, and ban districts from considering seniority and contract status in lay-off decisions. S1110 is the pay-for-performance plan. Late this afternoon, educators and parents took preliminary steps toward a campaign to overturn these laws.
On Friday, the Senate State Affairs Committee printed the latest version of the third Luna bill, now known as Senate Bill 1184. Click here to read more about it. Senate Education Committee Chairman John Goedde (R-Coeur d’Alene) announced it will be heard in his committee on Tuesday, March 22. Goedde will allow stakeholder testimony on Tuesday, but the committee will not hear from the public.
In other news this week, the IEA issued a news release on its receipt of the papers sought from Luna on the creation of his legislation. Of more than 100 pages delivered to the IEA, only about 20 spanned the weeks before he sprung his plan on surprised Idahoans; the rest detailed long-ago meetings of the Education Alliance of Idaho, whose very general goals Luna claimed to be the guts of his plan.
The release notes that in all cases, the stakeholders described in the papers were well known and included people whose identities Luna had no reason to keep confidential. “We are left to wonder whether there were other meetings with his ‘confidential’ confidants for which we did not receive documentation or which Mr. Luna and his staff did not record,” said IEA General Counsel John Rumel. Read more here.
