Dear Community,
The Seattle Educators Association (SEA) voted for an overwhelming majority to authorize a strike last night. We want to remind families that we have been through this before.
In 2018, SEA members voted to authorize a strike but came to a Tentative Agreement (TA) with SPS before school started.
In 2022, 95% of voting members passed the vote to authorize a strike. The strike lasted for five days.
In 2026, 91.5% of voting members passed the vote to authorize a strike.
This process obviously is not ideal for our families, but this is also a protected right of our nation and honors the process of collective bargaining. This news is received across the spectrum, from positive to negative, and maybe a little of both. We also want to acknowledge that a lot of our families have no idea that a strike will happen or how that impacts their families, work, and childcare support.
No one—not even one of us—knows what is happening in the bargaining room, and all the people in the bargaining room all likely have a different truth. The exhaustion of daily bargaining from 9am to 9pm can wear folks down and raise emotions. As second or third hand information is trickling into our space, it is important to take a moment to breathe, pause, and center ourselves in this moment.
Our PTAs and families are very vulnerable to either/or narratives, and the impact of these words will hurt. Both SEA members and SPS staff harm children. Both SEA members and SPS staff help children. We are living in a moment of multiple truths.
Every single child and their experience in this system cannot be reduced to a dollar amount, yet this is how we measure resources in our imperfect system.
PTA is about advocating to make every child's potential a reality. We find it helps to center and ground on that.
With a heartfelt reminder:
Always pay attention to who is not in the room, who is excluded from the conversation.
Consent always matters. Always. And that is particularly true when speaking on behalf.
We WILL have school again, and we WILL need to find our path to being community again.
If your PTA is planning an event at school on or after September 2nd, we encourage you to find a backup location to honor the strike.
Guidance to help support your community in navigating a strike can be found here. These are translated in Spanish, Somali, Vietnamese, and Amharic. We will update the message as we receive new info from our translators in Chinese and Russian. Please contact president@scptsa.org with additional language requests.
We can do hard things, and we do our best when we support each other.
With kindness and respect,
Seattle Council PTSA
