February 24, 1998

Journalists usually love a good juicy story. I 've just finished covering one I hated.

I never thought I'd be out shooting a "back to school" photo in February but today I was, after a grueling week emotionally, covering a highly inflamed school labor dispute in Racine.

Though I am loathe to cover anything my family has any involvement in, I have had no choice.

My wife is a middle school teacher in the Racine Unified School District...a district with 1,600 teachers; 21,000 students; and 31 schools.

The teachers have been without a new contract for several years. Teacher strikes have been illegal since a 50-day strike in Racine in 1977, a strike that many people still seem to be fighting.

The school district says its hands are tied by salary caps and spending limits imposed by the governor several years ago because of rising property taxes.

Though school board members have come and gone, Jim Ennis is still the executive director of the REA, the union. Ennis evokes images of bare knuckle fighter labor leaders of yore. He fights with words in TV interviews, though, rather than with his fists on the docks or in back alleys.

Frank Johnson, the district's Director of Employee Relations, has less of a public persona than his union rival, but he is no doubt as powerful. Though school board members and superintendents have come and gone since he came to the district, he remains as the unwavering symbol of the district negotiating teams.

The fault, without doubt, lies on both sides. And, in the middle of it all, is the Journal Times. We have been picketed several times in the last week.

Many teachers have never forgiven the JT for ill-conceived editorial comments during the strike (our reporter's words were forgotten in the then-publisher's decision to have a daily box announcing this was Day 16 of the illegal teachers' strike, or words to that effect).

We are blamed by some teachers simply because we are the messenger, but there are those who have more specific complaints about our editorials, which have generally been against the REA, and about our reporting of current issues. I know that some of the teachers I saw picketing us will be ones who will still regularly call me asking for coverage of events in their classes and clubs.

We sometimes have inside news about district contract offers; the REA usually won't comment, saying there is an agreement to not have either side discuss negotiations. In the past we have not been welcome in the REA headquarters.

And so we arrive at Monday February 16, when three schools were closed because so many REA members called in sick in the first day of what looks like a job action.

Eighteen schools were closed over four days of the sick-out. The union denied that there was any job action. Ennis said on TV, as he pointed to a Time magazine cover story about the flu, that union members were protecting the public from a health hazard by staying home when they were sick. He laughed when I told him that I had liked his statement, and that I was giving him a new title. "What was that?" he asked. "I've appointed you Surgeon General of Racine."

I went to the school district office to cover a press conference on Monday morning, the first day of this sick-out. We rarely cover press conferences - talking head photos are boring and rarely convey any meaningful information - but the news here was too compelling to ignore.

I dashed over to REA headquarters and then to district headquarters and was able to get more candids.

Friday was already a scheduled day-off in the district so Monday was going to be our first day of the lock-out. I had taken a picture of a crowded hallway at Horlick High School as students changed classes in December for a teen page story. I proposed that we run that photo small on Monday's front page along with a dominant image of a photo of the same hallway, from the same vantage point, with the same 300mm lens, shot Friday, to show what Monday's empty school would look like.

Monday was a day for more picketing and for fruitless negotiation and posturing. Word filtered out that the district was going to go to court to seek an injunction against the union, perhaps on Tuesday.

At Noon Tuesday, the REA ordered teachers back to school, starting Wednesday. The union knew about the coming court action. The district called a press conference for 2 p.m. I went to it. We had missed the Noon union press conference because we didn't know about it.

This morning I shot my "back to school" photos. A fifth grader, who had union stickers on her jacket, looked at me and said, "The Journal Times lies." How does she know? Her mother, who is a teacher, and her grandmother told her so. "What about the teachers who called in sick?" I asked. "They lied," she said. "So," I said, "People who lied are saying we are liars." I told her both sides in many stories we cover are often mad at us, which usually means we aren't doing such a bad job.

(This, by the way, is why we don't use pictures of children picketing, whether the photos are from school labor disputes, anti-abortion protests, or anti-war rallies; whether the pictures are from Racine or San Francisco; we don't like it when adults tell their children how to think)