Oct 14, 2002 2 min read

Unless this weekend brings the Brownsville Area School Board and its teachers to a truce, the teachers plan Monday to strike. This is the second school year they have shown up for classes without a contract and with a long list of the district’s shortcomings. Anyone who has paid just a passing interest to the Brownsville school board’s antics that have driven the district into debt and into overcrowded and deteriorating schools can understand the frustration of the teachers. Not only have they been unable to negotiate an acceptable contract, they swallowed two pay freezes in the past five years while teachers in surrounding school districts brought home substantial raises.

Many parents’ and students’ sympathies lie with the teachers even though a strike means the school year will be extended into June. But this doesn’t give the teachers’ union carte blanche in how they handle their information campaign.

The superintendent and board solicitor suspect that the union used a list of student addresses to mail information to parents explaining the teachers’ side. No one from the union has commented on whether this allegation is so. If it is, the union needs to apologize and quickly.

Information on students, including addresses and phone numbers, is to be kept confidential and used by schools only for official school purposes. It would be no more proper for the teachers to access this mailing list for propaganda purposes than it would be for the board to use it for the same purpose.

Both sides have a stake in keeping the public informed of their positions, but using student records isn’t the way to accomplish this.