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Teachers happy with the recent developments of Senate Bill 451

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Teachers could be heard throughout the State Capitol Complex all day on Tuesday and shortly after Noon, the noises were all cheers.

The House of Delegates voted to approve a motion to postpone the omnibus education bill indefinitely, by a 53 to 45 count, and that sent the gallery in the House into a frenzy.

“We fought for what was right and they listened and it worked out,” Samantha Stapleton, a first-grade teacher at Wayne Elementary School said as she walked out of the Capitol.

The vote to postpone Senate Bill 451 came from a motion from Delegate Mike Caputo, D-Marion. This essentially kills the bill.

Stapleton said like many other teachers, her passion for her job brought her to Charleston to rally Tuesday after a statewide work stoppage was called for by teacher unions across the state. The unions and educators were not happy with the Senate’s amendment to the scaled down House’s version of the bill. The Senate added on 1,000 education savings accounts and up to seven charter schools, two provisions that teachers have clearly been against.

“They can sit there and say we offered them the biggest pay raise in state history,” Tammy Osburn, a teacher at Ceredo-Kenova Elementary School said. “Keep it because I don’t want charter schools, I don’t want ESAs, I don’t want half the stuff that was in that bill. They can have their money.”

“They don’t get corporations to go tell a doctor how to do their job. We are told what we have to do when we have to do it and it is ridiculous.”

Many teachers were in agreement in saying the negatives in the bill outweigh the positives in the bill such as a pay raise for teachers of 5-percent, tax credit for school supplies, and changes in school attendance.

“This is obviously for the kids,” Nina Smith, a teacher at Ceredo-Kenova Elementary School said. “It’s not for someone trying to line their pockets. It’s not for silliness. We need to do what is right for the kids and help them out. Bottom line.”

Smith added the provisions the bill should have been looked at separately.

“That’s the way we saw it,” she said. “Legally it should have been done separately. I just feel like the Senate was trying to push things that were illegal. Throw everything together as one big bundle and that is the way it is not supposed to be done.”

The statewide work stoppage is not over yet as union leaders have called for a press conference at 7:00 this evening at the state Capitol.

Osburn believes it is not over yet in the Senate, either.

“The way the Senate has manipulated this whole system this whole session, I am sure they’ve got something up their sleeve.”

Smith, who has been a teacher for the three most recent teacher strikes in West Virginia and is retiring at the end of this school year, wants to see changes in education but the right ones. She said lowering the class size and bringing in more counselors would go a long way.





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