Saved by the Belle?
Some fresh blood aims to school an entrenched teachers’ union leader
by Liz Garrigan
Erick Huth has had a leadership role of one sort or another with the local teachers’ union—the Metro Nashville Education Association (MNEA)—for a decade now, developing a long list of detractors as well as a reputation for being a sharp-tongued antagonist willing to sacrifice the best interests of students to advance labor negotiations with Metro officials.
Two years ago, as the MNEA negotiator, he set quite an example for his charges when he suggested that school officials shift money from other parts of the then-$542 million school budget so that teachers could get more of a raise than what was being proposed. And in 1998, as union president, he wouldn’t take a position on the most massive schools issue to come down the pike in years, the proposed desegregation plan. Upset at what he characterized as inadequate raises and stalled talks on other bargaining points, Huth said the union would not “advance” a costly, $206 million desegregation plan that could mean smaller raises for school employees. Metro Council ultimately passed the plan without them. The teachers, meanwhile, continued complaining about personnel matters.
Finally, a few months ago, under the leadership of outgoing MNEA president Jamye Merritt and Huth, currently serving as vice president, many MNEA members became incensed that the union failed to communicate what was at stake during a vote for a pilot merit pay program at two Metro schools. Merritt and Huth complained that the private $2 million donation to reward teachers and even non-teaching employees for student achievement wasn’t enough, and the ballot measure was defeated among membership largely because the city’s teachers didn’t know what they were voting on.
Now Huth, who is once again gunning for the top position, is facing a challenge.
“We’re at a crossroads in MNEA,” says Napier Enhanced Option School teacher Jane Walling, a 25-year educator who announced Monday that she’s running for a two-year terms as president in the upcoming union election to be held by ballot March 26 through April 10. “Membership is way down. The newcomers don’t really understand what [the union] could be, but the old-timers do.… Teachers have not been informed, and they’re not happy with some of the things being said.”
Though Merritt recently told the Scene that union membership numbers hover at around 60 percent of Metro educators, Walling and many others suspect that’s a misleading figure meant to hide the truth that the organization is in fact circling the drain. Asked on multiple occasions to supply documents confirming the figures, the union has declined.
“In my heart, I know it’s below 60 percent, and in my heart I know they don’t want to show me that,” Walling tells the Scene. “Erick has been involved either as president, vice president, negotiator or something for the last 10 years, and therefore it’s been a downward cycle.”
Huth told The City Paper this week that the union is already working on plugging whatever holes there may be in the union’s membership deck. “We’re obviously concerned about membership because we’re a member service organization for one thing, and the other issue is that our membership level determines whether we remain the certified bargaining agent for teachers. We’re already in the process of trying to work up a campaign to address membership here in the spring.”
But Walling and others say the damage has already been done and that unless someone new takes the reins, the union will continue to be an ineffective, reflexive organization that doesn’t have the respect of the school board, Metro schools administration and even its own members.
“They just pass leadership from one to the other and all around—back and forth and up and down, all of those prepositions,” one public school official says of the union. “It’s been that way for years, and I think a lot of people have grown weary of this incestuous pattern of leadership…. In some cities, some of your top-achieving teachers are president of the union. That is not true here. They kind of say they’re for kids last. If we’re all going to put kids first, we need to partner with them in a more meaningful way.”
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