Banding Together for the Common Good

In this two-part essay, former and current Saint Paul, Minnesota, union leaders—Mary Cathryn Ricker and Leah VanDassor—share their local’s journey from transactional engagement with the community to robust partnerships. Unions know that educators want what students need, but they don’t always know how to win what students need. After nearly 20 years of developing deep ties to the community, Saint Paul offers strategies that can be applied across the country.     

–EDITORS

Reconnecting with the Community

By Mary Cathryn Ricker

In 2005, when I became president of the Saint Paul Federation of Teachers, I became a student of my local’s history as one way of looking for ideas about what we could become. I uncovered one of Minnesota’s, and the country’s, most historic unions. Founded in 1918, just two years after the first AFT local (the Chicago Teachers Union), Local 28—then the Saint Paul Federation of Women Teachers—became the first teachers union in the country to strike in November of 1946. (Local 43, the men’s union, voted to join them.) In Minnesota, we were the first to negotiate planning time for elementary school teachers in the early 1970s and the first to recognize National Board certification in our contract in the early 1990s. In reading about this work and in talking to some of the people responsible for this progress—including a member of that 1946 strike—a common theme emerged: this progress was a result of, not a coincidence of, community relationships and community progress.

This work echoed the words of our former US Senator Paul Wellstone, that “we all do better when we all do better.”¹ As our local moved from the substantial gains made in the 20th century into the 21st century, however, the work alongside our community atrophied. By 2005, we had become a union with a transactional relationship with our community. The progressive, collaborative work was muted, and community groups mostly knew us as the checkbook they could rely on to buy a table at their fundraiser, support their food shelves (or pantries), or donate to their school supply drives (which was ironic since our teachers and paraprofessionals were also buying supplies with their own money). Our relationship with our area’s elected officials had also become transactional. When we screened candidates for endorsement every election cycle, each would declare their love for teachers, point out the teachers in their family, and commit to supporting public education in return for our endorsement and a campaign contribution.

While transactional unionism may still successfully create the conditions to negotiate improvements in pay and benefits, it’s not what unions are built for. Unions exist to strengthen entire communities, starting with the workplace and radiating solidarity out and across the community so that health, safety, economic security, and the pursuit of happiness are strengthened for all.

The lessons we needed to move forward were both in our history and alongside us in our community. That first teachers’ strike in the country? Local 28 fought “For Better Schools.” The teachers’ demands included moving classes out of the schools’ boiler rooms and funding shoes for students who came to school without any—hardly the narrow focus on wages, benefits, and working conditions that the union singularly prioritized decades later.* By the time I became president, Local 28 had been narrowly focused on traditional bargaining for almost two decades, as if we couldn’t do both: negotiate what was good for students and fair to teachers, as AFT President Randi Weingarten says.

Our community was also offering us lessons on reestablishing better relationships. In 2009, a local union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 26, brought to its negotiating table a demand to use green cleaning products, for example. This demand was good for workers and for the community, and it helped us rethink what could be bargained. At the same time, a growing progressive community group, TakeAction Minnesota, was dramatically redesigning its process for endorsing elected officials, starting with the governor’s race.² Its reNew Minnesota campaign in 2010 brought Minnesotans together by training everyday activists in how to hold community meetings. Those activists then convened conversations in small house meetings, in coffee shops, and during large community gatherings to determine the values the people wanted centered in governing. The notes from these conversations were compiled into a narrative for a better Minnesota and presented to candidates and the public. In a large, statewide community meeting to which all of the participants were invited, this comprehensive narrative was unveiled, discussed, and adopted by the attendees. Most importantly, we all then committed to volunteering in the 2010 election, focused on our vision.

As president of Local 28, I was active in this work, and I invited members of the union to become active, attend community conversations, and get involved in the narrative development process. This statewide process created a shared commitment to making progress in all these areas—not merely passing along a traditional endorsement. But my local didn’t jump right into this big, interconnected work. We started small. I made it a priority to meet for coffee with community leaders and attend their functions. After promising first steps, I invited community-based organizations to our membership meetings so we could all get to know each other and, eventually, decide how to act on our shared values and goals.

At the same time, we prioritized inviting members of community organizations and unions who had children in the public schools to our membership meetings so we could get to know each other better. Our foundation was the very direct, incredibly important relationship we had with each other: meeting the academic, social, and emotional needs of their children in a safe and welcoming environment. For example, members of the Saint Paul Trades and Labor Assembly and members of SEIU Local 26 shared their hopes and dreams for their children in Saint Paul Public Schools. And members of the Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL), which is made up of workers who clean big-box retail chains, came to one meeting and invited us to join them in their incredible Black Friday strike in 2013. This solidarity opened up communication directly between members of CTUL and members of Local 28 about how to improve people’s lives together, like improving all students’ learning conditions and all workers’ working conditions.

Shortly after I became president, our union began to look into the issues that impacted our members and the community at large. For example, the cost of health insurance was impacting Local 28 members, and school families and community partners said they struggled to access affordable, high-quality healthcare. We used traditional communication, like our newsletter, to call for members to share their stories with me via email; we also put healthcare stories on the membership meeting agenda, where members could share examples of inadequate healthcare in school or through our insurance system. This resulted in a greater solidarity resolution that committed our local to fight for better healthcare for our members and for educators across the state, and for healthcare access for our students and their families. Acting on this resolution, our local successfully advocated at the state capitol for the Children’s Health Security Act in 2007, which expanded healthcare access for 50,000 uninsured children in Minnesota.

While victories like this were heartening, it became clear that we needed to include our work at the bargaining table in our growing commitment to the good of the community. In 2009, we opened our negotiations for public viewing for the first time. Negotiations with public employees are subject to Minnesota’s open meetings law, but no one had ever asked to attend our negotiations—so we invited people. We put key details like time and place on our website, and we made sure to invite our community partners and fellow unions. By 2011, we had made it our version of “must-see TV.” We scheduled our negotiations every Thursday, with a 30-minute preview of the agenda beforehand and a 30-minute debrief with the audience afterward. We’d ask what they heard, what they learned, and what their reactions were to the discussion. We’d also take a pulse check of their interest in the contract language we were negotiating from time to time so we could get a sense of whether or not they were committed to our proposals. In 2011, we began developing a contract action team as well. Team members attended negotiation sessions for educators and community members who were not available and brought their questions and ideas to our bargaining team.

These dynamic community engagement opportunities led to a groundswell of ideas. By 2012, it was clear to me that we had a substantial opportunity. What if, before we picked a negotiating team or set a date to negotiate, we asked the community what should be in our contract? While 2012 was the height of the “bad teacher/bad union” narrative³—where education “reformers” were blaming experienced teachers and our unions for the many problems public schools faced, funding lawsuits against union protections, and organizing alternative groups for teachers to join—I was confident in our community and our work. So, in November 2012, we launched a five-month community engagement process in which a longtime community leader facilitated community meetings, with Local 28 members attending to listen. We invited community partners and the public through our social media and traditional communications, purposefully publicizing and holding these meetings in community centers and accessible event spaces across the city. In each meeting, community members were asked three questions:

• What are the schools our students deserve?
• Who are the teachers our students deserve?
• What is the profession those teachers deserve?

Over those months, priorities began to emerge. Our community wanted more librarians, art and music opportunities, counselors, and social workers for all our students in all our schools. They wanted culturally relevant teaching and professional development for our teachers. And they wanted smaller class sizes throughout the school system.^†

In April of 2013, the community leader who had led this process took these priorities to our union’s executive board and reviewed them one by one. At the end of the presentation, our executive board adopted these community-generated proposals and then directed the negotiations team we had chosen to negotiate these shared community-union priorities. Negotiations began in May. Each proposal got its own presentation, with union members and community members sitting side by side at the negotiating table presenting each proposal to the district negotiating team.

To maintain community engagement throughout our arduous contract campaign, we had many strategies: open bargaining, petitions, door-knocking, snowbank signs (like lawn signs but displayed in the height of a typical Minnesota winter), a districtwide walk-in during a snowstorm, and rallies before school board meetings. After 10 months of negotiations and a marathon 24-hour negotiation session (again, in a snowstorm), we emerged with progress in each of  the areas the community had prioritized for the schools our students deserved.⁴

As a result of this newly revived way to engage our members and our community, new leaders emerged—including Leah VanDassor. In 2013, VanDassor, who had been a longtime building steward, became a contract action team member. Today, she is the president of Local 28. I’ll let her take our local’s story from here.

Deepening Union and 
Community Bonds

By Leah VanDassor

As the current president of Local 28, I know that my work builds on the strong foundation of those who came before me and depends on maintaining strong relationships with and among union and community members. One benefit of our deepening community ties has been deeper ties within our union. As we have moved forward in our social justice work and aimed to be more inclusive, we’ve focused on inequities across our bargaining units. As a result, in 2018 we decided that all three of our bargaining units—school and community service professionals, educational assistants, and teachers and other licensed staff—would unite to be one, adding power through increased solidarity. To mark this change, we renamed ourselves the Saint Paul Federation of Educators (SPFE).

When I joined the contract action team in 2013, more work was needed to expand our class size language, which was in a memorandum of agreement appended to the contract. While we continually made progress (the state of Minnesota requires licensed staff to bargain every two years), the work was far from over. In each of the next four cycles, we made more and more gains as we continued to push for language that reduced the number of students in each class. We fought for this instead of more pay for an educator with a larger class because the student experience was paramount. Finally, in our 2021–23 contract (a year after our second-ever strike and the year I became president), the class size language moved into the body of the contract. While moving language into the body of the contract may sound simple, it was as precedent setting as negotiating our first, successful class size language. No other local in Minnesota had class size language as a part of its collective bargaining agreement. After 10 years of negotiating this issue, it has now been added by state statute as an open issue to bargain for all education locals. Families and community members never let up on this essential aspect of the schools our students deserve.

From 2018, when we had our first strike authorization vote in this century, until 2023, when we realized the largest financial and benefits gains for all our members since the early ’90s, SPFE continued the robust work to strengthen education for all our students in Saint Paul. Throughout those campaigns, we continued to engage with the community to learn what was still needed. This ongoing work to bring in voices happens through our educators, who have relationships with families and community organizations. Our members are part of our schools and our city. The relationships they foster build out, and within, our schools so that we know we are pursuing what is needed and wanted for our students. To some it seems obvious, but individual conversations at student pickup and during open houses or conferences are incredibly powerful for both families and educators.

Grounding our work in the community and among our members was solidly in our DNA by 2017, so we started a new group, the Teaching and Inquiring about Greed, Equity, and Race (TIGER) team. It partnered directly with community members and families to demand that major corporations in the state pay their fair share. Before 2023, when the state passed a significant funding increase, education funding from the state had dropped to below 2003 levels.^‡ Still, even with the increase, funding is only up to where it was in 2009.⁵ And many districts, including Saint Paul, are seeing cuts in 2024. Why? Too many of our major local institutions do not pay their fair share of taxes and too much funding is being siphoned off for charter schools. The TIGER team’s agenda includes ensuring that (1) corporations, hospitals, and institutions of higher education (which are considered tax exempt) stop avoiding taxes and pay their fair share to the city and school district; and (2) there is a total overhaul of charter schools. Together with the community, we are slowly making progress, driven by relationship-building with key organizations that share our belief that public education is the bedrock of democracy, by a school board that supports our efforts, and by strong parent support.

Politically, an endorsement from SPFE really means something in Saint Paul. We have been told by many candidates that our screening process is the toughest out there. SPFE requires any candidate seeking an endorsement to spend a day with an educator in one of our schools. From this, candidates hopefully learn more about how an educator’s day goes and how our students show up and succeed in our schools. But our expectations don’t stop at the screening. Our endorsement process is the beginning of a relationship. We expect the candidates we endorse to continue to engage with us as we work toward a school district that can be the gold standard for the rest of the state and beyond.

Our continued engagement with the community has already been shown to be successful, as we now have a school board that was eager to work alongside us as we negotiated our last contract. Moving forward, we are in a relational space to be an actual partner in the search for a new superintendent. Getting to this point took time. SPFE’s work has been twofold: both within our membership and with our community. Within our membership, organizers and member-leaders collaborate to identify new members in each building who show an affinity for political work and to flag other members as strong contract action team members, building reps, or strike captains (if needed). Ideally, each of these union positions can be filled by different members, constantly growing the bench of those equipped to go out and find even more members who want to do more with their union. Within our community, members can help identify family members or organizations to which they belong as potential allies in our work. As those families become more involved, they too encourage others in our shared work.

But again, none of this happens overnight. As Mary Cathryn indicated at the beginning, we started renewing our work with the community in 2005, then extended it by opening up our bargaining in 2009. From there we have continued to build relationships with families and community members by engaging them through listening sessions, support for specific school site issues, and contract proposals like smaller class size and enhanced safety measures that greatly impact their students’ lives. Recently, we’ve worked with our state affiliate, Education Minnesota, to share what we’ve learned about open bargaining with other locals. Now, locals across the state are seeing the benefits of bringing their communities into decisions about teaching and learning.

This path isn’t the same for every local. We know that open bargaining and making proposals beyond the historic areas of collective bargaining of wages, benefits, and traditional working conditions may still be an outlandish idea to some. Nearly 20 years into this work, we know that our educators’ working conditions are also our students’ learning conditions. When we improve conditions for anyone, the rest of us also see gains in our own lives. There is always much still to do. All of it matters. All of it will make a difference. And that is why we continue to band together and bargain in the open for the common good.

Mary Cathryn Ricker is the executive director of the Albert Shanker Institute. A National Board–certified middle school English language arts teacher, she has served as Minnesota’s commissioner of education, executive vice president of the AFT, and president of the Saint Paul Federation of Teachers (now the Saint Paul Federation of Educators), Local 28. Prior to her leadership outside of the classroom, Ricker was a teacher for 13 years in Minnesota, Washington, and South Korea.

Leah VanDassor is the president of the Saint Paul Federation of Educators (SPFE). She taught English at Saint Paul’s Highland Park Middle School for 25 years and has been very active in the union for the past 15 years, serving as a building steward; a member of the contract action team, bargaining team, and executive board; and SPFE’s vice president. 

*To learn more about this strike, see “‘Strike for Better Schools’” in the Summer 1999 issue of American Educator: go.aft.org/4fd. (return to article)

^†In 2011, we won contract language on class size; as seismic as it was to win, it was actually a modest commitment of ranges for the elementary grades and for four core subject areas in secondary grades. Implementation had been uneven, showing that we needed to negotiate hard caps or averages, expand to additional subject areas, and create a school-based process that involved families and educators for addressing unusual or midyear circumstances. (return to article)

^‡For information on adequacy and equity in Minnesota’s school funding, see the Albert Shanker Institute’s analysis at go.aft.org/b5i. (return to article)

Endnotes

1. G. Cunningham, “We All Do Better When We All Do Better,” Star Tribune, September 22, 2010, startribune.com/we-all-do-better-when-we-all-do-better/103588254.

2. R. Stassen-Berger, “TakeAction Bestows Rybak, Thissen and Kelliher with Most Preferred Candidate Status,” Star Tribune, February 1, 2010, startribune.com/takeaction-bestows-rybak-thissen-and-kelliher-with-most-preferred-candidate-status/83215992.

3. K. Kumashiro, Bad Teacher! How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture (New York: Teachers College Press, 2012).

4. Workday Magazine, “St. Paul Teachers, School District Reach Tentative Agreement,” February 21, 2014, workdaymagazine.org/st-paul-teachers-school-district-reach-tentative-agreement.

5. J. Van Wychen, Gaining Ground: Minnesota’s Largest School Aid Increase in a Generation (St. Paul, MN: North Star Policy Action, 2024), media.websitecdn.net/sites/949/2024/01/Gaining-Ground.pdf.

[photos: Gale Family Library / Minnesota Historical Society; and Courtesy of Mary Cathryn Ricker and Leah VanDassor]