Seattle Teachers' Association records, 1958-1969

The Seattle Teachers’ Association or STA was formed with the 1958 merger of the Seattle Association of Classroom Teachers and the Seattle Grade Teachers’ Club. The plans for this unification had been in the works for nearly ten years, and it produced the largest schoolteacher organization in Washington State, with 2,500 members. The STA was formed to represent the collective bargaining rights of teachers in Seattle Public School District No. 1., with the objective of developing “public understanding of the objective of education, promote its goal, and encourage the professional growth of association members.” Over the years, the organization began to focus on the welfare of its members and became more strident in its advocacy efforts.

The STA was affiliated with the Washington Education Association (WEA) and the National Education Association (NEA).The STA also collaborated with the Local 609 and the Operating Engineers Union, two unions associated with building maintenance in Seattle Schools.

During much of the period covered by this collection, the STA had minimal bargaining and professional negotiating power. To gain leverage in this period, the STA used a variety of techniques: it pressured and courted individual local legislators, met with the school board and offered input, and commissioned and collected studies and reports to support the STA position. The STA also kept close ties to the WEA and NEA in this time period and used the resources and support of these larger, more established organizations. Much of the STA activities of this time period involved soliciting and sharing knowledge with the WEA, NEA, and other teacher organizations throughout the country. As a relatively new organization, the STA was mostly focused on accruing members and maintaining their participation. Therefore, much of the material in this collection deals with the day-to-day operations and organizing of the STA.

Yet at this time the STA did give attention to some specific issues. The STA was consistently concerned about issues of members’ salaries, rights, and employment, district funding, and school curriculum. Specific to the late 1950s and early 1960s, the STA particularly lobbied for teaching to be treated as a profession and, therefore, to be given the proper respect, resources, and salaries. The STA also supported local levies, appealings to voters and gain electoral support. This strategy was at its height in the early 1960s. At the same time, the STA argued that the levy system was only a band-aid and did not fundamentally address the salary issues. One other major issue of the time, particularly in the late 1960s, was the question of how to give a better education in Central Area schools, Washington Middle School, Meany Middle School, and Garfield High School. These schools suffered a variety of crises, particularly of student violence and protest, in the late 1960s. The STA was concerned with how to best aid the teachers in these schools, in giving them appropriate physical protection, emotional relief, and eventually alleviating the problems in the schools. Connected to this issue was that of school de-facto segregation, and the STA supported efforts to alleviate the racial segregation. Overall, the STA in this period was concerned largely with educator rights, but also with many related topics.

The STA began to take a more assertive tone during the later 1960s. For example, in 1967 president of the STA Pete Neuschwander declared that a proposed $15.7 million levy, the largest in Seattle history at the time, was “not enough.” ¹ The STA also assisted with a football and cross country coaches’ strike in 1968 and began to threaten a teachers’ strike if the proposed 1968 levy did not pass. Some of this increased assertiveness may have been in response to pressure from the Seattle Federation of Teachers, or SFT. The SFT competed with the STA for membership and typically took a harder-line and more assertive action, like picketing a compromise in teachers’ wages in 1967.

Much of this assertiveness, however, was probably in response to gaining negotiation power. The STA worked with the WEA to pass the Professional Negotiations Act, or State of Washington Chapter 143 Law of 1965 (amended in 1969). STA President Wes Ruff hailed it as a great step, stating, “‘The Seattle School Board, without a doubt, is one of the finest in the state…. But there is a difference between us making a half-hour ‘presentation’ and actually hammering things out in real negotiations…. The board, the decision-maker, owes itself the opportunity to have conversations with the practitioners in the field, the educators with knity-gritty information.’” ² This law furthered the impact of genuine educator input in district policy by granting certificated Seattle school district employees a representative body for the purpose of negotiating with the superintendent and school board. This legislation had a broader scope than wages, hours, and conditions of employment, as it allowed for educator input on such features as curriculum and textbook selection. According to the Professional Negotiations Act, the body that communicated with the school board was required to represent not solely teachers, but all certified personnel within the district except the superintendent. Therefore, the STA created the Seattle Alliance of Educators, or SAE, an umbrella organization that advocated on behalf of the Seattle Teachers’ Association, the Seattle Principals’ Association, the Seattle Administrative and Supervisory League. Membership was indirect, via enrollment in one of these constituent organizations. The requisite involvement of administrators and principals placed many of these employees into difficult positions, straddling the fence between their administrative roles and positions as employees and SAE members. By the mid-1970s, the administrators and principals had disbanded their organizations, and the SAE had very little actual administrative participation. In 1976, the SAE merged back into the STA, and an STA Bargaining Commission was formed to perform the duties of the SAE.

A large subgroup of this collection contains primarily WEA-produced materials. The WEA was formed “to promote the cause of education in the state of Washington.” It was affiliated with the NEA and the STA, but covered all teachers in the state. Many of these artifacts specifically deal with the WEA’s relationship with the STA, such as correspondence with STA leadership. For a history of the organization between 1970 and 1985, see the finding aid for the Seattle Education Association Records, 1958-1985.

Notes on Organizational History

• 1. “Record-Size School Levy to Be on Ballot,” Constantine Angelos Seattle Daily Times, September 21, 1967, p. 32.
• 2. “School Directors Fear Negotiations Act” Seattle Daily Times, November 18, 1965, p. 11.