The Leon County teachers’ association is engaged in ongoing negotiations with the school board, pushing for higher wages.
Teaching has been an overlooked profession for decades, challenging entry-level and seasoned teachers to go above and beyond without the proper compensation.
Tamerah Williams, a second-grade teacher for Leon County Schools, shares how many teachers find themselves struggling with intense workloads and pay that often doesn’t match.
“People are getting burned out, but their pay is not equally how burned out they are,” she said. “There’s a lot of young teachers going in, but they are also coming out just as fast. Our generation isn’t staying in a place where they’re unhappy.”
The National Education Association ranked Florida No. 50 in average teacher salary nationwide. These concerns have been echoed in meetings with Leon County Schools officials, yet continue to widen the gap between the cost of living and the demand for teaching.
Joyous Booker oversees and helps all first- through third-year teachers in the district understand their contracts and interprets her understanding of negotiations.
“Teachers want more money,” she said. “We want more respect, all of the above. With negotiations, it feels like the district doesn’t want to move with providing us more funds.”
When Booker first heard of the county’s proposal, which would equal about a $40-a-month increase to teachers’ salaries, she was agitated.
“I was upset,” she said. “As educators, we do a lot. My contract ends at 3:15 as an elementary school teacher … most days, I don’t leave work until almost 5 o’clock. The other things we have to do [besides teaching, such as] putting in grades, grading papers, making phone calls to parents, and sending emails are things we have to find time for. Sometimes we can get it done inside of our contract hours, but most times we don’t, and when I say most times, I’m talking about 98 percent of the time we do not have time to do those things, and those are basic education duties.”
Booker describes what the teachers’ association is fighting for.
“Respect, pay, and responsibilities—that’s always our three major points,” she said. “We deal with a lot of in-class behavior, and the district has created this discipline matrix that’s pretty vague. It outlines the action and the consequences, but then says a student may receive one to three days of in-school suspension or three to five. It doesn’t align with the extremities.”
Booker conveys what the community can do to support the association.
“We need everyone to rally together,” she said. “We really need everyone to have conversations with educators and see what educators are doing [outside and within] those contract hours. For example, we started ‘Work the Contract,’ where teachers create a list of everything they have to do after 3:15 or before 7:45 [which is outside of contract hours for elementary school teachers]. So the district understands that what you all are paying us doesn’t constitute the amount of work that we have to do. We’re not saying the contract needs to be extended to 6 o’clock at night, but we’re saying pay us our worth.”
Booker lays out what’s next for the association.
“Currently, we’re going to impasse,” she said. “A third-party judge will come in and look at all the information that LCTA (Leon County Teachers Association) has and all of the information that Leon County School District has, and they will make a ruling on what they see fit.”