My Autoethnography

I grew up in a very small town just outside of Louisville, Kentucky, on the Indiana side of the Ohio River. I went to a very small high school where everybody knew everybody. My high school is not really known for anything other than the marching band and track. However, the school corporation finally broke into the news during my junior year.
The teachers in the school corporation had, at the time, gone three years without a contract. Up until then, there was not a lot of talk about it, and the teachers never brought it up. It was an issue where you knew where everybody stood, yet never discussed it. However, from the first day of my junior year to today, the teachers and school board have been publicly going at each other. At the beginning of the year, the teachers had a meeting and decided that they were going to start pushing for their new contracts. They stopped volunteering to go on field trips, stopped coming in early and staying late. The teachers that were coaches or in charge of clubs and groups quit, and most of the groups pretty much died because they required a teacher to sponsor them. The teachers also began to talk about it and tell the students all that they knew about the contract issue. The teachers also wore shirts to show unity at school and would hold signs and rallies outside of the school. The teachers in our school corporation also started to go to school board meetings with their signs and t-shirts to demand a contract. Billboards also started contain messages to support the teachers and cause problems for the schools administration.
One day during my senior year, I got to school early and was hanging out with my friends before classes started we had noticed that our Calculus teacher was not at school so we were all in a good mood. Then, the bell rang so we went to class. When we got to the room, we realized that the teacher was not there. We sat around for about fifteen minutes and then our principal came in and told us that he was going to stay in there until a substitute came in, and that they had run out of substitutes. The class ended and we never had a teacher. We went to our lockers and were waiting to go to our next class, and then my friend Brad came up and said that his mother had told him that all of the teachers had taken a personal day. We did not doubt the truth in this since his mother worked in the school office, and started to laugh. I went through five of my seven classes without having a teacher and at this point we were all hoping that the teachers would do this tomorrow. The teachers ended up coming back the next day and were in a lot of trouble for it, and decided to never do it again because of the risks.
The teachers started to get everybody in the school district on their side, and also talked to their union. Now, the school was appearing on the local news almost every week. We were really surprised by this, because the news stations hardly ever mention the Indiana part of the viewing area and only covered Kentucky stories. The teachers were really the only side getting any kind of positive publicity out of this, and now the crowds at the school board meetings had grown so large that the meetings were moved to the high school auditorium to fit everybody in. also, there were now news cameras from at least three stations at every meeting.
My friends and I were planning on attending a rally to support the teachers. It was expected to be a huge event. The news channels were going to be there and everybody in the school district was showing their support. I think that one reason the whole county was backing our teachers was because it was by no means a wealthy area. There is virtually no middle class, with the majority of people working in the factories in Louisville, unemployed or do not speak English. Teachers do not make a lot of money and they used this to get support. They had mainly shown numbers and information to show that they had not had a pay raise in three years even though teachers at corporations near us had. Plus most people agree that teachers generally do not make as much as they deserve.
The day before the rally I read a news article that said that the teachers had already rejected to contract offers because the pay raise was not high enough. I did not think it was either, but the teachers were already some of the highest paid in the state of Indiana, so it is not like they needed it. It sounded to me like many of the teachers were not even considering the effects on the students’ education and were trying to get as much money as they possibly could. This caused me to stop supporting the teachers because the students at the school already had it bad enough and now they were not learning anything in school whether they wanted to or not.
My absence from the rally had no effect on it. I did not think it would or plan on it. The teachers got plenty of support, but still do not have a contract and it does not look like they will anytime soon.