SUMMER 2025
ISSUE 03

We spoke with high-school teachers Joe Stapleton and Carlos Perez about their efforts to build the Durham Association of Educators (DAE) into a wall-to-wall, majority union in the South. The wave of red-state K-12 strikes, from West Virginia to Arizona and beyond, and the wider Red4Ed movement, is one of the signal developments in the labor movement over the past decade. What stands out in the Durham example is the highly effective way a small, dedicated group of militants, and then the wider union, was able to integrate and respond to the self-activity of “classified staff,” a category including cafeteria staff, custodians, bus drivers, social workers, and front office workers among others. 

At Jordan High School, DAE militants formed the Jordan Workplace Organizing Committee (JWOC), which developed building-level issue campaigns and stoked worker confidence through bottom-up decision making and creative actions on the shop floor – organizing led by union and non-union workers alike. These efforts proved valuable during a later statewide campaign led by DAE’s parent union, the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE), when the school district rescinded hard-fought raises for classified staff and worker militancy exceeded the bounds of the union’s strategy.

Seeking “to not just fight on behalf of classified staff, but to fight with them,” DAE refocused its efforts onto the issue of classified staff wages. With their experience of building-level organizing, JWOC was able to intervene meaningfully in this moment, along with other building-level organizing committees. In their words, “[f]rom beginning to end, our campaign was driven by a small but dedicated group of union militants with a commitment to union democracy, leadership development, solidarity, and class struggle.” This not only built concrete solidarity across the union’s varied job classifications, but ultimately helped the union reach majority status and win the largest school budget in Durham’s history. Most significantly, DAE proved it was, indeed, a “real” union, contrary to the perception of some workers and despite lacking access to collective bargaining and other standard union rights. DAE became a relevant and fighting force in the lives of Durham Public Schools workers.

L-H: Tell us about the Durham Association of Educators.

JOE & CARLOS: Durham Association of Educators (DAE) is a local of the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE), which is the state organization of the National Education Association (NEA). NEA is one of two major unions, along with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), representing K–12 educators in the United States. Many school districts in northern states have different unions representing different sectors of the workforce – for example, Teamsters representing bus drivers while AFT represents classroom teachers. But because of low union density in the South, DAE is wall to wall; we represent classroom teachers, bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers, office administrators, teaching assistants, school social workers, and counselors. The major division among members is between “certified” and “classified” staff. The former are mostly teachers while the latter includes cafeteria staff, custodians, bus drivers, social workers, front office workers, etc. Classified staff have historically seen DAE as the teachers’ union, but we have made strides toward ameliorating this perception in recent years.

Technically, any Durham Public School employee is eligible for membership in DAE. This even includes principals, which can lead to friction within the organization and make union action at individual workplaces complicated and awkward. While this has influenced the form DAE’s actions have taken historically, we wouldn’t say it presents major everyday issues. The modern NCAE was formed in 1970 through a merger of the North Carolina Education Association, which represented white teachers, and the North Carolina Teachers Association, which represented Black teachers. These organizations had been around since the late 19th century.

L-H: What is a day in the life of a DAE teacher like? What are conditions like?

J & C: Like most K–12 workers in the United States, DAE workers are overworked and underpaid. North Carolina is ranked 43 out of 50 states in terms of teacher compensation, and the pay for classified workers is mostly lower than the same job in the private sector. Many of us work in buildings that are in various states of disrepair – this year alone has seen gas leaks at multiple school locations, soaring temperatures due to malfunctioning HVAC units, and sporadic flooding due to outdated plumbing systems. Planning time is all but nonexistent for elementary school teachers, and high school teachers routinely find our planning period taken up with staff meetings, lunch duty, and – new at our school this semester – bathroom duty.

Our schools often serve as a clearinghouse for wider social problems, which teachers are then expected to somehow “fix” by educating students. Students experiencing unstable living situations, hunger, and unreliable transportation regularly show up to school late, unable to focus on learning. We lack an institutionalized say over our working conditions, which, in combination with incompetent district leadership, leads to enormous gaps between expectations and resources. In recent years, the day-to-day issues that stand out are the low and confusing pay structure for classified staff and inadequate transportation (too few bus drivers and monitors and inefficient bus routes). Students regularly arrive late to school. On certain routes, services have even been suspended in the lead up to winter break.

L-H: What is the legal and political context that DAE operates within? What is the prevailing culture and organizing orientation?

J & C: Public sector workers in North Carolina are legally prohibited from collective bargaining and strikes. This was enshrined during Jim Crow to disempower the majority Black public-sector workforce. This makes some workers question whether or not we are a “real” union. This is a significant obstacle to organizing, even if the past couple years have done much to help people recognize that we are a union, despite lacking certain basic labor rights.

Politically, North Carolina is a purple state. We have a Democratic governor who is broadly supportive of public education, and a Republican-dominated General Assembly that is committed to dismantling it. North Carolina historically placed high value on public education, all the way through the 1990s. Right-wing attacks against the school system took off in the 2000s – including private schools and the school voucher movement – and chipped away at a once-proud institution in this state. You’ll hear a lot from teachers who have been around awhile that the state used to be a great place to work as a teacher. This isn’t just nostalgia. In 2000, North Carolina ranked 23 for teacher pay nation-wide; now, we’re ranked 42. More locally, Durham is a Democratic Party stronghold with a progressive self-image.

For a long time, NCAE and its locals employed a “service” model, where members engaged officers and staff the way they might any other service. However, after a change in leadership around 2015, and influenced by the Chicago Teachers Union organizing model from their high-profile strike in 2011, DAE pivoted toward intensive organizing, emphasizing campaigns, strong leadership, plans to win, etc. This transformed DAE into the most organized and active local in the state, dragging NCAE as a whole toward a stronger emphasis on organizing. DAE led state-wide one-day walkouts in 2017 and 2018, building on the power of the red-state teacher strikes in West Virginia and Arizona in 2016. DAE also sought to become a player in local politics through relationships with school-board members and county commissioners exercising the influence of our vote and endorsement process. Until last year, we never had union staff, only local presidents “released” from teaching, either part- or full-time, for their term.

L-H: What is your own approach to workplace organizing? Are you in any organizing formation within DAE, formal or informal? If so, how is it composed and what does it do?

J & C: We’ve been in the district for several years (Carlos since 2017, Joe 2018), working at Jordan High School in classrooms across the hall from one another! We have prioritized developing the capacity of our coworkers to self-organize through democratic decision-making and direct action in the workplace. Our fortunes have ebbed and flowed over the years, influenced in part by changes in the leadership and direction of the local. During the challenging pandemic years of 2020–22, we formed a semi-independent organizing committee at our school, the Jordan Workplace Organizing Committee (JWOC). At the time, the local emphasized “building-level teams” composed of a handful of active union members in the school, which typically took up district-level campaigns and tactics determined by the president or board. Instead, JWOC included all workers at our school – school counselors, custodians, cafeteria workers, teachers, etc. – regardless of union membership. Our attitude was that everyone is in the organizing committee; some are just more active than others. Any worker at Jordan could come to meetings and participate in collective decisions. We identified our own workplace issues in the school and developed successful campaigns, big and small, that built up our capacity, confidence, and reputation within DAE. We accompanied newer teachers to meetings with the principal to raise workplace issues, and during remote learning, we organized a campaign to keep students from in-person state testing during the thick of the pandemic. During this time, we took an ad hoc approach to collaborating with our local around issues like the return to in-person work.

L-H: What was the experience of teaching and organizing during the pandemic?

J & C: Teaching during the pandemic was hell. Remote learning proved to be a disaster, even if it was the only thing we could do at the time. We are still seeing the effects on both teachers and students. The vast majority of students essentially lost a year of learning. Many simply did not attend Zoom classes. The two years following the return to classrooms were the most difficult in terms of behavior. We saw a spike in fights, drug use, etc. After a year of “fake” school, the whole idea seemed to have lost its urgency. Previously, it was a widespread and solid social requirement, but now it felt as precarious and contingent as anything else. Absenteeism soared in North Carolina: immediately prior to the pandemic, it was at 11 percent; now, it is at 27 percent. I (Joe) am an English teacher. The students I have now missed fifth grade due to the pandemic. Some of their reading levels have recovered. Many have not.

This was also an extraordinarily difficult time to organize. We were still a minority union at that time, and while DAE meetings are nominally open to non-members, in our building we really promoted JWOC meetings as a venue for all workers. This led to broader participation in decision-making around campaigns that affected everyone at our school. During remote learning, we had “Wellness Wednesdays” each week, when students and staff were off school. The year we returned to in-person learning, we were able to negotiate a continuation of this, which for many educators approximated a four-day workweek during an incredibly stressful period. (Elsewhere, school districts have resorted to four-day weeks to deal with understaffing, but ours was the initiative of workers.) A broad set of union and non-union workers led this campaign, and it showed what we could do at the building level if we were organized. The connections we made through organizing in such difficult times proved significant during our campaign last year.

L-H: The organizing initiative that began in 2023 was another turning point. What were workers demanding, and how was the campaign different from earlier campaigns? How did this shift show itself in the workplace and among the rank and file?

J & C: The big difference in 2023 was that the campaign was developed and planned at the state level – an NCAE initiative with significant input from DAE. In short, NCAE identified a set of districts across the state with the potential to reach majority status, Durham among them, and allocated staff and resources accordingly. The union staff assigned to Durham were exceptionally dedicated, skilled, and militant; this wasn’t narrowly about membership numbers. The plan to grow the local was linked to developing local campaigns targeting the relevant county’s budget, necessitating the introduction of new organizational forms and initiatives. While the state funds schools, every county distributes a supplement to its school district as a portion of its overall annual budget. In the absence of collective bargaining rights, the yearly budget serves as a sort of proxy negotiation. The idea was to demand an ambitious supplement to fund raises, positions, and other improvements.

In Durham, the main organization of the campaign was a District Organizing Committee (DOC) made up of building-level organizing committees at each school. The project began in summer with workers making commitments to attend meetings, take on organizing tasks, and communicate the progress of the campaign to workers in their building. Once the school year started, new people flowed into the campaign and quickly proved their organizing skills and commitment. Our campaign in Durham centered around four demands: meaningful raises for all staff, more staff in every building, more time to do our jobs well, and a seat at the table for public school workers. The details of each demand were debated and voted on democratically in marathon weekend DOC meetings throughout the first semester.

Prior campaigns, while naturally aiming to increase membership and organization in addition to their specific goals, often had a one-off quality. We would campaign to get a thing, we would get it or not, and then it was over. From the beginning, this campaign felt as though it was part of a broader vision for the whole state. There was a plan to reach membership majority with real resources dedicated to it. For the first time, moreover, raising membership numbers was openly talked about as a means toward significant workplace action, with the understanding this would likely be necessary to get what we wanted. There was a sense of urgency and purpose, especially to those who had been involved for a while.

In the first semester, we did “blitzes,” where a group of workers would take a day off and go to a school to make membership asks, and “parking lot posses,” where workers would hang out in parking lots of “cold” (low membership) schools and talk with workers before and after school. But it was also tough – we were building our leadership structure as we went; we were making many membership asks with an often discouraging rate of return; and we had encountered skepticism from coworkers after the union’s relative passivity during the pandemic.

L-H: How did this play out? What were the major events and contours of the struggle?

J & C: The turning point in the campaign was right after the MLK Day weekend. The district sent out an email informing classified staff – the lowest-paid and most precarious workers in the district – that the long-overdue raises they had finally received in October were being rescinded. This meant a cut in hundreds of dollars per month for many workers and over a thousand for some. The district even claimed that many workers had been “overpaid” due to an accounting error and were required to pay back the district. This email sent shockwaves throughout the district. We were on membership blitzes at different schools when it arrived. I (Joe) distinctly remember the anger on the faces of classified staff in an elementary school library as their principal explained the news.

Almost immediately, classified staff began to take action in the form of sporadic and loosely organized wildcat strikes. Most schools experienced some kind of disruption. Custodians and cafeteria workers, in particular, stopped showing up for work. At our school, the Parent–Teacher Association was called in to take out the trash leading up to a school dance. We had a difficult time talking with some parents who did not realize they were scabbing (or did not understand the concept of a “scab,” for that matter). The parents expressed confusion, caught between supporting the staff and their concern to make the school look nice for an upcoming dance. It was all quite chaotic, but it set the tone for the next month of the campaign. We hadn’t planned on anything like a work stoppage until May. But here we were in January, without having built the kind of capacity and organization we needed across the district, and classified staff were already out.

The union had a decision to make: stick with the plan, continue to push membership growth and the budget demands, or switch gears and focus on the classified staff pay issue. To the union’s immense credit, we did the latter. We were feeling pressure from classified staff, many of whom had long felt distant from the union’s priorities. We realized that if we were going to reach majority, let alone become a legitimate fighting force, we needed to turn our attention completely to this issue.

Classified workers were very responsive: more than one hundred workers showed up to a meeting that Carlos co-facilitated on two days’ notice. Many classified staff joined the union because of the fight back. Our school’s front-office receptionist, a classified worker, told Carlos, “I’ve been talking to a lot of people in the district, and they think DAE is the bomb dot com.” We held a rally in the pouring rain at a school-board meeting and over one thousand people were there, including many classified workers. Things got heated when the school board went into a closed session, so much so that an NCAE official asked us to make sure no one broke any windows. Little did he know he was asking the exact wrong people!

We started planning for “days of action” in late January. It’s difficult to express the level of overall militancy in the workplace during this time. We routinely dropped in on gatherings of custodians as they discussed the latest communication from the district and what they should do about it. When we were collecting strike votes, workers immediately understood why we had to go out – more than 80 percent of our building voted to strike.

Generic dissatisfaction with the district had been present for a long time, but this was a definite shift. It became increasingly clear that the district was incompetent, borderline corrupt, and that they were forcing the lowest-paid workers to pay for their mistakes. We had never seen the district so politicized. This atmosphere has persisted and widened beyond workers. At a recent school-board meeting, a parent commented that “people trust DAE, not DPS [Durham Public Schools].” They even ended up firing the superintendent, which we had not demanded.

We planned rolling days of protest: one on Wednesday, January 31, and then, depending on the school-board response, even more schools would walk out the following Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Twelve schools, including ours, went out on the first Wednesday. The day before as the bell rang to dismiss school, we were frantically running through the halls confirming workers had taken a sick day. We made calls throughout the evening doing the same. At first, it seemed as though the district was planning to pull together a skeleton crew from central office to staff the schools enough to warehouse students, but that was before they knew how many schools were going out. When we got the call that school was cancelled at Jordan, it was the culmination of a years-long effort. During the actual day of protest, many workers came to the Staff Development Center for a rally and picket, and we held food pickup and distribution for students who were missing school.

L-H: Did this elicit any response from the school board?

J & C: The initial demands leading up to the first day of action were (1) no pay cuts for classified staff, (2) include relevant job experience outside Durham Public Schools in the pay schedule for classified staff, and (3) commit to regular meetings with DAE to resolve the classified pay crisis. The next day, the school board announced that it would meet with DAE, with no movement on the more material demands. It was an ambiguous result – they met some demands, but the critical matter of classified pay remained unclear. We had a decision to make: should the Monday schools go out? Had the school board done enough?

This led to one of the most powerful moments of the campaign. On Saturday, with schools set to go out again on Monday, union leadership convened and decided that the school board had made sufficient movement to call it off. The reasoning was basically sound; we didn’t want to appear unreasonable as the board moved in our direction, and we wanted to holster the remaining schools who were ready as “bullets in the chamber” should we need to use the tactic again down the road.

However, when the decision to call off the Monday days of protest came before the DOC, the pushback was immediate and intense. Monday schools were adamant about going out. This had less to do with the school board’s response, whether it was sufficient or not, than the recognition that rank-and-file workers were eager to take action and would be disillusioned if they were held back. It was an interesting and revealing moment. Leadership was thinking in terms of a wider strategy, in which this decision made sense. But there were other, visceral factors on the ground in the school buildings. One teacher organizer at a Monday school expressed their disappointment by pointing to how hard they had worked in a short time to reach the demanding thresholds for going out. They had talked to almost everyone in their building and seen 80 percent commit to taking a day. Public school workers had never gone on strike in Durham, and the idea that we would finally be doing it was exciting for a lot of people who were not otherwise heavily involved in union work. Workers also had such a profound and long-standing sense of disrespect from district administrators that there was also something cathartic and dignifying about going out, whatever the leadership’s reasons against it.

The meeting became tense, and some classified staff walked out. But NCAE staff and union leadership handled it well. They heard the dissent, regrouped, and opened the floor for debate and alternative proposals. In this moment, our organizing committee at Jordan played a decisive role. We conferred with organizing committees from other buildings during the meeting and patched together a new proposal in real time, including seven schools heading out on Monday. The membership voted overwhelmingly in favor of our proposal. We were willing and able to do this because of our experience with contentious and high-attendance building-level meetings. During the days of protest, we had teams of workers going to “cold” schools telling them what was going on, explaining why, and inviting them to join the fight.

It was around this time we realized the importance and urgency of the “seat at the table” demand from our original petition demands. Classified workers could no longer accept an inconsistent paycheck month after month. Moreover, they were frustrated by the district’s unwillingness to provide information about changes in pay. One of the key demands of the days of protest was to delay the implementation of pay cuts for classified staff as long as possible, to give them time to plan. Ultimately, the district went through with drastic cuts to classified pay, but not before a fight and much later than they had hoped. In the end, it was understood as a partial victory for the union.

Having recognized the salience to workers of accessing a “seat at the table,” we developed a proposal for a meet and confer policy – a legal alternative in the absence of collective bargaining rights for public sector workers in North Carolina. After the days of protest, the school board agreed to set up a committee, which included DAE members and district staff, to compose an official meet and confer policy. From this moment, even as we pushed the county for a historic budget in spring, meet and confer took center stage.

L-H: What were the outcomes of this campaign? How do you assess what you were able to achieve (and not achieve)? How do you reflect on your organizing methods and the role of worker self-activity and self-organization within them?

J & C: We got to majority, which was a huge victory and extremely gratifying. We also won the largest public school budget in Durham County’s history, partly by parlaying the intense organizing we had done in January and February into the budget fight. We cannot imagine that this budget win was possible without the fight for classified pay.

The fight for meet and confer throughout spring yielded few tangible wins. This fight is ongoing, with a new superintendent engaging in bad-faith maneuvers and an internally divided school board. That said, it is undeniable that the meet and confer fight has raised the class consciousness of workers in the district from union leadership on down. Seemingly small linguistic changes reflect a broader shift in workers’ understanding of their relationship to the district. The district is increasingly “the boss” and we have been accusing them of “union busting” since last Spring – language that would have been previously unintelligible to most members.

Throughout spring, however, it became increasingly clear that the ad hoc committee to set up the meet and confer policy was a stalling tactic, with anti-union school-board members hoping it would “die in committee.” The ad hoc committee meetings were contentious and ultimately went nowhere. It was clear the district was not operating in good faith. In late 2024, the DAE delegation walked out of an ad hoc committee meeting, saying it would resume talks with the district when the district wanted to get serious. Many DAE members rallied before a school-board meeting in late spring and made public comment calling for the school board to stop union busting – and we were joined by representatives from many other labor unions, including the Duke Graduate Student Union (SEIU Local 27), Union of Southern Service Workers, United Electrical Local 150, the Duke University Press Workers Union (NewsGuild), and others. This outpouring of solidarity showed members that we are part of a broader labor movement.

Throughout the campaign, one of the main questions we struggled with was how to not just fight on behalf of classified staff, but to fight with them. Our union has made progress here, incorporating classified staff into its top leadership body and forming cafeteria and bus driver committees.

At the same time, the development of campaigns remains too centralized for our liking, and top leadership positions are so labor intensive that they prevent many workers from running (anyone with kids or second jobs). However, leadership has shown an appetite to confront the boss, and rank-and-file workers have recourse to mechanisms for challenging leadership, as they did in the DOC meeting over the decision to pause the days of action.

This year feels different. There is no lightning-bolt event like the classified pay debacle from last year. Meanwhile, the new Trump administration has unleashed systematic attacks on the public sector in general and K–12 in particular, which has left many of our coworkers feeling paralyzed. At the same time, many workers are adopting increasingly politicized positions against the district’s union-busting tactics around a meet and confer policy.

L-H: What has this experience taught us about organizing in K–12 in the South? What’s your view of the future for this organizing, especially in the context of emboldened repressive elements in state and federal governments?

J & C: The various barriers to labor organizing that we face in the South – from low union density to legal constraints – require us to be more consistent, creative, and combative. Throughout the campaign, DAE was a consistent presence in the lives of our coworkers. We had rank-and-file union members outside of schools, bus lots, and district events throughout the school year talking to thousands of our coworkers face-to-face. Union posters and flyers hung in the copy room, on bulletin boards, and on classroom doors. Our social media included rank-and-file members from various job classifications. We adopted a wide range of tactics to meet the moment: membership blitzes, house visits, phone banking, walk-ins, sick outs, community letter writing, and more. Most importantly, we developed a willingness and capacity to pose a credible threat to the school district through mass disruptive collective action that challenged business as usual and extracted significant gains.

It is also worth noting the critical role that a militant minority can play in reviving the labor movement as a whole. From beginning to end, our campaign was driven by a small but dedicated group of union militants with a commitment to union democracy, leadership development, solidarity, and class struggle. In our case, this circle of union militants expanded during the campaign, bringing in new rank-and-file leaders from different schools over time, and the extent to which we can maintain and expand its breadth and depth will be crucial for the fights ahead.

The ongoing attack on the public sector in general and public education in particular poses an existential threat. This has had a significant effect on morale and our capacity for mobilization. Given that education is the most unionized industry in the United States, the fate of public education is intimately tied to the fate of the labor movement as a whole. But we are beginning to see signs of a fight back emerging among public sector workers as a whole. We expect that success in this struggle will require the kind of militant tactics taken up by workers in the 1960s and 70s, which made the public sector a union stronghold in the first place.