906 SIGNATURES — MEMBERS DESERVE ANSWERS BEFORE A STRIKE

Our petition requesting a recall election for Ibijoke Idowu has reached 906 signatures—about 16.2% of SEA's 5,589-member baseline and well beyond the 10% recall threshold.

Meanwhile, SEA is preparing members for a possible strike this week, with Special Education among the biggest unresolved issues.

Yet a veteran SPS Special Education teacher wrote to me today:

“The focus and distinct ratio…is it a proposed combo and cut to 1:1:10 or 1:2:10? … And the union needs to do a much better job of communicating the impact of the special education changes!”

That is the problem.

If Special Education is important enough to take thousands of educators to a picket line, members should know exactly what we are fighting over.

SPS has now publicly claimed its proposal would improve staff-to-student ratios for almost 70% of students with IEPs, create 40 new paraprofessional and certificated positions, create another 70 paraprofessional and 20 certificated positions deployed strategically according to student need, and add six school psychologists.

SEA tells us Special Education remains one of the biggest obstacles to an agreement.

So show members the difference.

Show us the current ratios.

Show us SPS's proposed ratios.

Show us SEA's counterproposal.

Show us which positions would be eliminated, converted, added, or moved.

Show us the impact on individual schools, pathways, and students' IEP services.

And why are we trying to settle a massive restructuring of Special Education under a strike deadline in the first place?

Our existing contract already provides for a joint SEA–SPS Special Education Task Force to address systemic Special Education issues.

The educators and parents behind SPSforKids have proposed a reasonable alternative:

“Withdraw the restructure from contract negotiations. Refer it to the joint SEA–SPS Special Education Task Force with published analysis and a public board vote.”
Take the restructuring out of the strike deadline. Settle the economic package separately. Publish the school-by-school and IEP-service impacts. Use the existing joint task force to thoroughly examine the redesign. And take the underlying Special Education funding crisis to Olympia.

Staffing ratios absolutely belong in collective bargaining. As a member of the SEA Bargaining Team, I have repeatedly argued at the bargaining table that our current CBA staffing ratios are a strength of this contract—protections we should be defending and building upon, not bargaining away in a rushed restructuring of Special Education.

This isn't about accepting SPS's version of events.

It's about members being given enough information to independently evaluate both sides.

Before asking educators to sacrifice pay and leave their classrooms, leadership owes members a clear explanation of why a strike is necessary and whether reasonable alternatives have actually been exhausted.

And 906 people have now signed a petition demanding their right to decide whether they still have confidence in the president leading this union.

This is why transparent, competent, member-driven governance matters.

906 signatures. The recall threshold has been exceeded.

Please sign the petition AND complete the SEA Member Recall-Election Signature Attestation Form CLICK LINK HERE. If you have already signed the petition but have not completed the attestation, please do so. The attestation helps establish and verify that recall signatures come from active SEA members.

Please sign. Please attest. Please share.

Honor the bylaws. Let the members vote.