The news is trickling in right now that with under 36-hours until the first community college strike in the state of Oregon, the Board of Education and the full-time faculty  at Mt. Hood Community College have been able to agree on a 3-year contract. I don’t have any of the specifics, but this is definitely good news! Congratulations to the MHCC faculty!

UPDATE 5/10/11 9:13pm
I am now being told that the faculty have ratified a tentative contract, but the board still needs to ratify it tomorrow night. Here’s to hoping…

As the ongoing labor disputes continue at Mt. Hood Community College, I have fled to Clackamas Community College for the term to avoid having to cross a picket line. I have taken the opportunity to take some religious studies classes not available at MHCC, which I have found enjoyable, but I truly consider MHCC my community college home until I transfer to Portland State University next year sometime. Now the full time faculty have announced a date and time for the strike. According to the Oregonian, they will be officially on strike at 5am on May 12th, 2011. Meanwhile, the administration is threatening to replace any teachers who decide to strike. No community college in Oregon’s history has forced the teachers to strike, so the water is sort of uncharted territory. Tomorrow they will be marching from their crisis center to the campus; I will be joining them. On May 12th I will get out of my Historical Jesus class at CCC and drive to MHCC to join them on the picket lines. It is a real shame that this has to happen, but I will support them 100%.

I first mentioned the labor disputes between the full-time faculty and the administration at Mt. Hood Community College in mid-February with my letter to the board and their (psuedo-)resonse. That initial letter was specifically spawned by my dissatisfaction with a letter the MHCC administration released to the students where they stated:

First of all, rest assured that the College is doing everything it can to lessen or eliminate any potential impacts to you if your instructors decide to go out on strike. We are expanding our interim pool of qualified and available part-time instructors to seamlessly assume teaching duties created by striking faculty.

After feeling like the concerns of the students were not being fairly heard, I worked with a small but amazing group of students to organize a rally before the monthly board meeting. The turnout was small and all attempts to try to get the media to acknowledge the problems were falling upon deaf ears.

Not feeling terribly confident that the Board of Education would suddenly decide to have a change of heart, I ended up making what was a very hard decision: I withdrew my financial aid from MHCC for Spring term and am instead taking my math class and a couple of religion classes at nearby Clackamas Community College. Despite my not being enrolled in MHCC, I vowed that in the unfortunate circumstance that the faculty are forced to strike, I would be spending my out-of-class time studying on the picket lines with them. The possibility that this may happen became even more present last night when the teachers voted to approve a strike if necessary. This doesn’t mean they are going on strike, but only that they can; if a decision to strike is officially made, the faculty will be required to give 10-days notice.

Several MHCC students, including board candidate Jenni Simonis, organized yet another rally to try to get the board’s attention. This time there was no media blackout. Falling the day after the vote, major local media outlets were running headlines like, “Rally planned as teachers poised to strike at Mt. Hood Community College,” and from what I understand, every local media outlet was on campus today as well. I have, however, noticed a disturbing trend in the media coverage I’ve seen thus far, namely that board members and students get interviewed in a story about the teachers striking, but commentary from the teachers seems to be strangely absent.

The strangest twist in this whole story is, however, something pointed out by one of the faculty members on Facebook. It would be funny if so many people weren’t being impacted by all this. It turns out that the “interim pool of qualified and available part-time instructors,” which the administration assured us would be available “to seamlessly assume teaching duties created by striking faculty”; when board chair Brian Freeman assured me in his canned response back in February that, “the College will not only remain open for business, it will continue to meet the needs of its 33,000 students and the community that supports them”; and when Freeman told the Oregonian earlier today that students “can be assured that we’re going to provide them with quality instruction,” what they forgot to mention was where the source is. Look no further than Craigslist. No, I’m not joking. A perusal of education job listings shows how prepared they are, they’re going to the same place I go to sell used comics.

Update:
This photo was taken of the student rally by one of the best philosophy instructors anyone could ask for, MHCC’s own Chris Jackson, and is used with permission:

In a finals week filled with some of the strangest and most unexpected twists and turns, I have missed finals, filed for and now withdrawn from two political campaigns, and plunged into the depths of internal crisis. Having been unhappy with the Board of Education at my school, and having written a letter, organizing a rally, having an article in the school paper written about it, and still feeling unheard, I got this crazy hair on Monday (the Monday of finals week no less!) to join fellow student Jenni Simonis to run myself with the idea that if the board won’t listen to the students, the students should join the board.

Meanwhile as I was working on a research paper for my writing class on, of all things, democracy, I was also participating in the process. I collected signatures around campus and the community to get my name on the ballot so I could help make a positive impact on my school and on Thursday morning I filed as a candidate before driving back out to school to finish up a take-home math test before going into my math final (which incidentally was scheduled for Tuesday and not Thursday contrary to what I had on my calendar, but that’s a whole different story).

When I got home, I looked up the list of candidates running and noticed that the incumbent I wanted ousted had already decided not to seek reelection, and more than this, one of the candidates running seemed to me to be hands down a far better candidate than myself (and I hope I don’t end up eating my words on that). The step from here seemed simple: I should withdraw from the race; so I did. But I also had been informed as I was making this decision that there was an individual on my local school district’s board who was running unopposed and who I had recalled having been appointed and never elected to begin with, and then his profession is a banker on top of that.

My love of democracy was offended by the prospect of not at least giving the citizens a choice to choose between two people, and with very little time before the filing deadline, I decided to run for that race instead. This seemed to me at the time to be something I had no choice in, but it was honestly not something I really wanted. This caused me immense stress: on the one hand I really have no political aspirations, I just want to go to school and learn and become a teacher so I can continue the cycle by teaching students all the great stuff I learned as a student; on the other hand I have an immense love of my community and a strong belief that good people with good intentions and a strong moral fiber are needed in our democratic process and the belief that, if the community chose me to represent them on the school board, my decisions would be focused on what would be the best for the students, the faculty, and the community; so I felt I had to run.

Friday, while other students where relaxing on spring break, I spent the day building a campaign website, setting up endorsement meetings, speaking to the chair of the school board, and other campaign tasks while battling with what I had gotten myself into. Here I was — a poor student with no desire to be involved in politics if I can help it, with nothing but a love for education and a ideal of a better community — realizing how far over my head things had become. And the meetings would be two Wednesdays a month, something that would require me to fail to meet other commitments I have on Wednesday nights.

I was torturing myself about what I should do, because I did not want to be where I had found myself, but didn’t want to let the community down. Perhaps this seems overly idealistic to some, or maybe like I’m giving myself too much importance to others, but I again had to let my community down. My love in life is school and this term I spent far too much time getting caught up in far too much external stuff and I felt the term was not as great as it could have been as a result. My time needs to be devoted to my studies, and a position on the school board would mean at times either my studies or the school board would have to take a back seat; the commitment to the community would have to come first, so my studies would have to come second. I cannot let this happen. So Saturday afternoon I ultimately decided to withdraw from the race. As a good friend of mine told me, “well you don’t have to save the world that way you know.”