Former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer: I don’t believe teachers ought to strike
Mar 21, 2018, 5:45 PM | Updated: 8:28 pm
Former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer. (AP Photo)
(AP Photo)
PHOENIX — Former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said Wednesday she does not believe teachers ought to strike, as teachers from nine Phoenix-area schools staged a “sick-out” to participate in a rally at the state Capitol.
“I don’t believe public employees — whether they be teachers or police officers or firemen — ought to strike,” Brewer told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Mac and Gaydos.
“I know and I understand how frustrated the teachers are, but what they did last night by notifying parents by robo calls that they would be closing the schools and [parents] go to work and they don’t have places for their kids to go, it sets a very poor example for their students.
The schools in the 12-school Pendergast Elementary School District closed down on Monday as teachers took to the Capitol to call for higher wages and better treatment.
Brewer said that while she supports giving teachers more pay, she believes they should have striked on their free time, not during their time of employment.
“It’s a situation that needs to be resolved,” she said. “We have to come up with a solution — and what is that solution?
“We’ve been dealing with it for years, teacher’s have been putting up with it for years. We need to get a policy made, together, and get [this issue] resolved.”
Brewer stressed that if policymakers, like her successor Gov. Doug Ducey, do not “act like grownups and do something about it,” then the state will lose more teachers, leaving students to suffer.
“Who wants to live in a state where teachers are so underpaid that we’re losing all of them?”
Ducey had long pushed for increases in education without raising taxes. In 2016, Arizona voters approved Proposition 123, which added $3.5 billion — money from the general fund and a state land trust — into K-12 education over the next decade.
Brewer, who championed a voter-approved temporary sales tax increase to fund public education during her time as governor, said policymakers need to find revenue in order to pay teachers.
“Many of them pushback, pushback, pushback,” she said. “How are we going to convince our policymakers that these people deserve a pay increase? And how are they going to pay for it?
“Teachers want to be paid. And they deserve to be paid.”
