Teachers in Beverly, Marblehead, and Gloucester carried out the longest strikes in state history last year.
Two Massachusetts parents have filed lawsuits against their local teachers’ union seeking compensation on behalf of all students and parents who were affected by the teachers’ decision to launch illegal strikes last year in violation of both state law and a court order.
Teachers in Beverly, Marblehead, and Gloucester carried out the longest strikes in state history in November 2024 — a record-setting twelve days in Beverly and eleven and ten days each at Marblehead and Gloucester, respectively — leaving parents furious as local lawmakers begged instructors to get back to class.
Now, two parents of Beverly public school students argue that the strike led their children to “lose learning and the enjoyment of their civil rights” and caused them emotional distress and economic damage.
Students attended school just 4.5 out of 16.5 potential days of instruction in November, which included several scheduled days off for Election Day, Veterans Day, and Thanksgiving.
“When teachers go on strike, they are placing their own demands ahead of their students’ needs,” said attorney Daniel Suhr, who is representing the Beverly parents.
“This behavior is illegal and disgraceful, and it sets a horrible example for young, impressionable students who admire and respect their teachers,” he added. “Families endured real harm, and they deserve justice. These unions need to be held accountable to show others nationwide that these actions will not be tolerated.”
The suit also names the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA), as well as teachers’ unions in Newton, Malden, and Brookline, which the parents say encouraged the Beverly strike, including by donating money to the Beverly union.
The Beverly Teachers Association (BTA) was ultimately fined $810,000 for its illegal strike, but the parents argue that the fine is an inadequate punishment given the chaos and harm caused by the strike.
The suit argues that the strike “damaged thousands of students in Beverly Public Schools by interrupting their educational process.”
“The students and parents both endured emotional distress and anxiety living the roller-coaster of negotiations, court orders, and nightly updates always wondering, ‘Will school be back on tomorrow?’” the lawsuit said.
One of the parents behind the suit, Janelle Donahue, is a single mother who had to take time off from work because of the strike. According to the lawsuit, she experienced panic attacks and cried during sleepless nights over the unpredictable school schedule caused by the strike.
Donahue’s youngest child, who has ADHD, “struggled immensely” during the strike because of the lack of structure and missed speech-therapy sessions.
“Adjusting to returning to school after any unusual break — even after long weekends — is very difficult for Janelle’s kids,” the lawsuit said. “After the prolonged closure, the process was traumatic. Her children cried at drop-off as they struggled to get out of the car and want to go to school.”
The new lawsuit against the Beverly Teachers Association is not the first case in which parents have sued teachers’ unions for striking.
A group of families in Portland, Ore., filed a lawsuit against the Oregon Education Association and the Portland Association of Teachers last year seeking more than $100 million in damages related to a month-long strike by the teachers’ union.
That lawsuit is also being handled by Suhr and his firm, Hughes & Suhr LLC. The firm has set up a website to handle similar class-action inquiries from families affected by teachers’ strikes.
Meanwhile, the Beverly school district ended up holding school on five Saturdays in the spring and winter and extending the school year by two days in June in order to make up for the time lost during the strike. The district also cancelled February vacation and pushed back the start of the December holiday break by one day.
In November, Beverly School Committee president Rachael Abell told National Review Online that the strikes were far from a last resort for the teachers’ union.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association, which was working with the BTA and its counterparts in the other two districts, first warned the school committee in October 2023 that it intended to strike in Beverly because the community is perceived as being affluent, she said.
The school committee worked in the months that followed to initiate collective bargaining and had hoped to use interest-based bargaining, where the parties sit side by side with a facilitator to work together to fix problems in the existing contract. The collaborative practice was used to settle the district’s last three-year contract.
But Abell says that the then-president of the BTA, Julia Brotherton, pushed back at every turn. Abell said the teachers, led by Brotherton, refused to use interest-based bargaining and purposely delayed meetings. Brotherton, for her part, dismissed this version of events in a statement to NRO, saying that no meeting occurred in October 2023 in which the MTA warned of strikes and that the union did not intentionally delay the process but instead needed additional time to get all of its members on the same page regarding contract proposals.
Brotherton argued that the union had a “disappointing history with [interest-based bargaining] that has cost our members a lot of money.”
Abell says that when the first negotiating meeting occurred in February 2024, the school committee got its first inkling that it was being “set up.”
The BTA turned up with the “longest list of proposals we had ever seen,” she said, surprised that none of the issues had come up in previous “mutual concern” sessions. The process that followed was unlike any contract negotiation Abell had ever been a part of in her nine years on the school committee.
“It was sort of like a script and we were in a play — even though we didn’t want to be in a play — where each session would have some sort of high drama or high conflict and no progress, and the BTA was putting out Facebook posts saying such and such happened, and it was not at all what happened,” she said.
The school committee knew what had happened in Newton — a local community that had weathered an eleven-day strike last winter, the previous state record — was now playing out in Beverly.
The school came to the table with just four proposals — compared with roughly 50 on the teachers’ side. The committee ended up dropping one of its proposals, including one concerning teacher attendance, which has been a problem in the district.
The committee made several formal offers as the end of the existing contract neared — including an offer that would appropriate the largest one-year increase in school funding in Beverly’s history, at $5.6 million.
Committee members looked to negotiate over the summer, but Abell says they were met with outrage from teachers saying they shouldn’t have to negotiate during their time off. Brotherton, for her part, says that teachers couldn’t negotiate over the summer because members had other jobs and commitments that would keep them from attending any of the handful of dates between June and August proposed by the school committee.
But the committee later learned that the teachers’ union was actually in the process of incorporating, in an effort to shield themselves from personal financial liability during the eventual illegal strikes.
It was part of the playbook that the MTA was running in several other communities, including Marblehead and Gloucester. (Brotherton argued that the incorporation process did not delay negotiations, saying that “incorporation does not protect any of our members from liability for wrongful acts they might take.”)
But after twelve days of learning loss, the final agreement will cost the city only $60,000 more than what the school district offered in August.
And the mêlée cost the district more than $500,000 in police details and legal fees.