Teachers in Beverly, Marblehead, and Gloucester carried out the longest strikes in state history in violation of state law and a court order.
Students in three Massachusetts school districts missed weeks of instruction last month after local teachers’ unions launched illegal strikes in violation of both state law and a court order.
Teachers in Beverly, Marblehead, and Gloucester carried out the longest strikes in state history last month — 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.
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.
Even Massachusetts’ Democratic governor, Maura Healy, urged teachers to “get back to school,” calling the strikes “unacceptable.”
But Beverly Teachers Association co-president Andrea Sherman insisted that teachers would not return to the classroom until a contract was reached to address the “crisis in Beverly Public Schools.”
“They are waiting to force us back to broken schools with no contract,” Sherman said.
A Union ‘Set Up’
But the strikes were far from a last resort for the teachers’ union, says Beverly School Committee president Rachael Abell.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association, which was working with the Beverly Teachers Association and its counterparts in the other two districts, first warned the school committee back 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 using 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 the then-president of the BTA, Julia Brotherton, pushed back at every turn. She said the teachers wouldn’t use interest-based bargaining and delayed meetings. Brotherton, for her part, dismissed this version of events in a statement to National Review, saying that no such meeting occurred in October 2023 where 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.”
When the first negotiating meeting occurred in February, Abell says 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 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 teachers couldn’t negotiate over the summer because members had other jobs and commitments that would have kept 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 MTA was running in several other communities, including Marblehead and Gloucester. (Though 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.”)
“The MTA helps the local teachers’ associations organize and protect themselves and create a situation where they can avoid having to pay the fines by declaring bankruptcy,” Abell said.
“It really has been frustrating, from my perspective, having worked so well with the teachers’ association in the past to have this other actor infiltrating the normal course of things,” she added.
With state law on its side, the school committee went to the Department of Labor Relations to thwart an impending strike. Commonwealth Employment Relations Board (CERB) sided with the school on the same night that the union voted to strike, November 7. The board ordered the union to “immediately cease and desist from engaging in or threatening to engage in a strike or work stoppage, slowdown or other withholding of services.”
It was the first of several orders that found the union was in violation of state law, including a court-enforced order of $50,000 in fines per day, with a $10,000 escalator.
“The Union has engaged in self-help and is undisputedly engaging in an illegal strike, placing thousands of students at Beverly Public Schools out of school,” CERB found. “While it has alleged in the public forum, that it had to go on strike because the School Committee has not bargained in good faith and that it would not cease its illegal activity until the School Committee reached a ‘fair’ settlement with it, the Union did not file any charges of prohibited practice with the DLR under the procedures set forth in Section 11 of the Law, prior to going out on strike, alleging a failure by the School Committee to bargain in good faith during negotiations for a successor agreement.”
The board found the union’s message that the committee was not acting in “good faith” were “clearly designed to garner the public attention to coerce the School Committee into capitulating to its demands.”
As such, the board ruled that the school committee would not be required to continue to bargain with the union while its members remained on strike — a tool the school committee did not employ until the very end of the strike.
The teachers’ efforts were buoyed by public support, which hinged on several “emotional topics” — many of which were complete nonsense.
One popular talking point was about teachers’ desire for longer lunch and recess — policies that would not fall under a teachers’ contract.
Publicly, teachers were outspoken about the need for paraprofessionals to make living wages. The school committee was drowned out as it tried to explain that paraprofessionals do not work a full-time position in the way that teachers do — they are paid by the hour, yet they still receive full-time benefits. The committee “did lots of work to improve that hourly offer.”
The teachers also wanted more non-student-facing time than the existing school day allowed but rejected a proposal to lengthen their day by 35 minutes, Abell said.
Brotherton said the union was looking only for an addition 15 minutes of in-school prep-time for both elementary school teachers and middle school teachers. Middle school teachers already have a 45-minute prep period that had been shortened down from 60 minutes after the school moved buildings, she said.
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.
‘They Say They Care about the Children’
But, of course, it was students like Chuck and Erica Kostro’s daughter, a sophomore in high school, who suffered the most.
“This is the second time in four years [students have] been locked out of school,” he said, referring to the Covid lockdowns of 2020. “I think it’s pretty universally acknowledged that this was detrimental to the kids and then all of a sudden we’re doing it again. It’s somewhat unbelievable.”
Students are still rebounding from that Covid-19-related learning loss, in fact. Statewide, students lost 75 percent of a school year’s worth of math learning and 41 percent of a year of reading during the pandemic, according to a study by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University.
Student test scores suffered, with statewide reading scores dropping from 1.18 points above the national average in 2019 to 0.77 points above the national average in 2022. In math, scores were 1.06 points above the national average in 2019, but were just 0.3 points above the 2022 national average.
And Massachusetts fared better than other states because then-governor Charlie Baker banned remote instruction, forcing teachers and students back to the classroom for the 2021–22 school year.
Tim Miller, parent to two high school sophomores and a junior, said he’s “certainly happy” the strike is over. “But my main concern now is how do you make up the learning loss?” he said, adding that he’s not sure that the school is capable of doing so.
Adding in days at the end of the school year will not make up for the loss of instruction in November for students who have to take fixed exams throughout the year, including for Advanced Placement classes and college-entrance exams, he noted.
And the situation has led to bad blood in the community that is unlikely to be forgotten anytime soon.
Erica Kostro said the teachers’ behavior was “unbecoming” and that it will take a long time for her and other members of the community to trust them again.
“They say they care about the children, but when push comes to shove, they’ll abandon those children overnight if it means more money,” Kostro told NR.
During a mediation session early in the strike, the BTA called its counterparts from Marblehead and Gloucester to surround the school where meetings were being held.
The protesters, some of whom were armed with lead pipes, banged on the building and played loud music. Afterward, small bottles of alcohol and solo cups were recovered in the parking lot — despite the presence of children at the protest.
Abell had voicemail threats left on her phone. There were two days where she had to step away from her phone entirely because the teachers’ union had given her phone number out and it wouldn’t stop ringing. She received 20,000 emails — half of which were from a bot.
“I understand the mob mentality and that a lot of people didn’t know what they didn’t know and they just went along because the teachers are such trusted and respected members of our community. How could you not do what they ask you to do, right?”
Miller and the Kostros faced animosity on social media for going against the grain as well. “We found that there was a gathering resistance of people who felt like I did, who weren’t being heard because they were afraid of retaliation, whether it be on their sons and daughters in the classrooms, or whether it be in instantaneous condemnation from the social media sphere.”
With negotiations wrapped up, Abell walked in the community’s holiday parade last weekend, as she has done in years past, and handed out peppermints to children.
“I have never received so many hugs as I did this past Sunday, and I was really encouraged until [in] one family, the mother said, you can’t take candy from her,” she said.
Now, Abell is facing a recall effort.
And the MTA has its sights set on another community — Belmont.
“I think there’s a real reason why our public safety officers and our teachers are not allowed to strike,” Abell said. “Strikes are based on emotion and strong feelings and connections and they are a tool, but it’s not the appropriate tool for a community, especially one in Beverly, where we have had such a long history of working collaboratively together.”