I don’t think I would know anything about the NPS/NTA contract negotiations if it weren’t for The Lion’s Roar newspaper. As young(ish) students, we are privileged enough to believe that “ignorance is bliss” when we see our teachers “coincidentally” wear blue shirts on Tuesdays, or rally outside of the building before A block.
But as journalists, we’re not granted this privilege. Our job is to report on the facts we see in our community, and for the past year, these negotiations have been a large part of our focus. When we see the blue shirts, we notice. When we see teachers coming in from the cold after a demonstration, we notice.
Yet it is insight that is not easily adopted. Much of the student body (at least at Newton South) notices these things too, but whether or not they decide to try to understand it is at the discretion of the student.
Because while those of us interested hold these negotiations at the forefront of our minds, these ideas rarely enter the classroom. Yes, teachers sometimes outwardly show their support for the union; however, we don’t have the time to discuss or address it. Our schedule is simply too packed with the rigorous curriculum that both the teachers and the School Committee are fighting for as we speak.
So I was surprised when things started taking a turn within the student psyche. Yesterday, we returned to the building after the long Martin Luther King weekend, but now, these negotiations were at the forefront of all of our minds. There is a certain buzz in the air, one we’d never felt before.
And while many of us have been preparing ourselves for this culmination since the start of negotiations, it caught fellow students off guard. Yesterday, as I was walking to my Environmental Science class, I heard some (who I assumed to be) underclassmen walking in the hall and talking about the fact that we might not have school on Friday.
“What is it even about?”
“I don’t know, but it’s something about their salaries.”
And they are far from the only students all of a sudden interested in what’s going on. All day, I’ve had people ask me if I know anything about what might be going on and what Friday might look like. There are so many questions.
“Will we have unexcused absences? Is this going on our transcript?”
“What’s wrong with the pay that the teachers have already?”
“Isn’t striking illegal in Massachusetts?”
“Are my teachers going to get fired?”
And these are questions that we don’t know the answers to. Many of us are wondering the same things, but even with our fragments of knowledge for what we might be able to anticipate, we still are left in the dark. We still don’t know what to expect, and we worry for not only ourselves, but our teachers too.
Because theirs is the tangible perspective we can humanize. We understand the people we see every day at 9 in the morning, the people we consult when we have a bad day, sometimes even the people we trust the most.
But there is very little trust right now. There is very little trust in the students’ perception of their teachers’ anticipated “success,” and there is also little trust in the “all-knowing” School Committee to truly make a decision in the interest of not only our teachers, but us, the students, the people who are expressed as the reason for all of this action in the first place.
Whatever might happen on Friday is the culmination of frustration and anger, on both sides, that have been building up since October 2022, and some think of it with fear. Fear of the fate of our teachers, district, and our education, because this doesn’t happen every day. It’s the very thing that we learn in our history classes that caused so much commotion in our nation’s history. Here it is, right in front of us — of course we’re not going to act normal.
But, honestly, most think of it as the snow day we should have gotten yesterday.
Bella Ishanyan is a senior at Newton South High School and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Lion’s Roar. Last summer, she was a Fig City News student intern.