School Daze 

• Courtesy photo
• “It’s unnecessary and divisive and creates this overall sense of distrust.”

CAPITOL HILL—Education is once again a hot topic at the Utah Legislature—so hot that teachers are feeling burned, according to Heidi Matthews, president of the Utah Education Association (UEA), the state's largest teachers union.

The 2022 session started quietly for public schools—the early legislative furor was reserved for overturning Salt Lake County's mask mandate—with lawmakers making good on a nascent requirement to fund inflationary costs at the start of their 45-day conclave.

But the friendly feelings turned sour fast, as bills became public that—through various means—would insert state government and public scrutiny into virtually every classroom decision, potentially with legal liability for teachers whose choices are deemed unbefitting.

City Weekly caught up with Matthews to chat about how UEA is approaching the back half of the legislative session and what parents should know about the ongoing fight over school transparency.

Benjamin Wood: How are things going?
Heidi Matthews: This has been rough. We started the session really hopeful, we had great things like the funding for enrollment growth and inflation that were approved in the base budget.

The tone that sets is what we had hoped for. It means public school funding is starting the legislative session from a true zero with the base budget, rather than being in the hole from the get-go and having to fight and claw for funding.

But then the bills started dropping—and moving at warp speed, in some cases without public comment.

I take it UEA isn't being asked to consult on these bills?
No, and we're seeing a wave of education bills across the country. In many cases, it's cookie-cutter legislation from groups like ALEC or The Manhattan Institute. It's part of a nationwide strategy.

We're seeing it happen here and we're seeing the impact of pretty egregious bills that incite controversy and put up barriers between parents and the educators in our classrooms. It's unnecessary and divisive and creates this overall sense of distrust.

So we're dealing with these political issues and the bill-specific language being sponsored. But then we also have an overall tone and context that has really cast a pall over the members of UEA. They're feeling like, "I've had it." We're at the breaking point and then we see proposals like a bill that sets me up to be sued if I do something a parent finds objectionable in the classroom.

Most bills don't pass. Has legislative leadership given you any indication of whether these transparency proposals will move forward?
There's a collective responsibility of the Legislature to rein some of this in. Regardless of intentions, it is having an enormous impact on the very people that we need to be supporting right now.

[Rep.] Teuscher's bill [requiring teachers to post the minutiae of their lesson plans online and making it burdensome to deviate from those plans] was pulled, but that was after a petition that gathered almost 34,000 signatures in two days. It completely struck a nerve.

The bills just keep coming. It almost doesn't matter what they say at this point. It's felt as an attack and it's a very real, important feeling and sense of underlying distrust that needs to be paid attention to.

What are your goals for the last half of the session?
We are spending so much time opposing bad bills that won't bring about better circumstances for our students or keep educators in the classroom while we have this dire [staffing] need. We're spending so much time fighting that it's preventing us from getting to what we support.

There is some good legislation being proposed that isn't getting attention because of the nonsense. There are bills on literacy and funding proposals for special education, at-risk student support and all-day kindergarten. But one of the things that we are really pushing for is flexible, educator-directed time.

That's what we hear about over and over and over. There's the circumstances of the pandemic, there's a substitute teacher shortage and all of these factors are coming together so our teachers are covering for each other during prep time and then they're having to take work home.

Paying attention to that now is a critical piece in looking long term and addressing challenges. We had a teacher shortage before the pandemic and now we're combining that with these political attacks.

Not Legislature-related, necessarily, but what should parents be aware of as the Salt Lake City School District downsizes?
I applaud the wisdom of the school board in looking at what they're doing right now and how it will play out in the future. I think we need to take that approach. They're assessing, they're not ignoring the problem.

Things shift over time. We just want to make sure that we're doing what we can for our people who are in the classroom right now. Retention is the best recruitment and they're in a tricky situation with declining enrollment.