I did not help with the student-led ICE protest at my school.
But it would be completely on-brand for me to do so, I was an easy target and there’s certainly an argument to say I’m the preferred target for both the charging party and the defense party.
Several students asked me to help them organize the protest, but I declined, as I was on my best behavior for the campaign.
The district I work in has 18 high schools and most of them had student ICE protests. No other educators had been disciplined in any capacity, despite adults doing some heavy lifting to carry out the initiative students had started (…or so I had heard).
In the summer of 2025 our caucus, CORE, put on an ICE Defense Training for educators, put together by me. It wasn’t just for educators, we had some workers from other industries and some parents join us, but it was mostly educators. We held it at the IBEW union hall, a connection that I believe I initially made in a roundabout way through our union president, though I can’t quite recall.
Our union members were not very engaged in union work that summer, despite being in contract negotiations. The organizing committee (that I still chaired, at this point) had no assignments from leadership, so I reached out to our president and asked if I could utilize the committee structure (that I had built) to advertise the training. He said yes, until someone from our Governance Board asked if it was “CEA approved” and he said no.
And it was always like that. First yes, and then no.
Over 60 educators showed up from our union. I was surprised at the turnout, as it was the middle of summer and most people were slow to respond to the ask. But this shows what I’ve always said to be true: members will show up if it’s something they care about.
That’s why the rank and file must always lead the direction of the union. If it is going to work for workers, it needs to be led by the workers. But our union has a top-down decision making model, often referred to as a “service model” of a union. We said this often in the campaign, that we must flip the model of our union to an organizing model instead of the service model, and that top-down decision making was not working.
On the second candidate debate night, our union president told one of our campaign supporters “you can’t lead a union from the bottom, from a committee” and I looked at Chris in the parking lot and screamed.
“A COMMITTEE IS NOT THE BOTTOM OF THE UNION! OH MY GOD THAT’S MY WHOLE POINT!”
The “bottom” of the union, when you have the top-down leadership, is the rank and file membership, the members that pay dues but aren’t reps or necessarily “involved”. I would go so far as to say, theoretically, in a post-JANUS world, the “bottom” of your union is actually the people you are forced to represent that aren’t members, and you should think about them when organizing, if you’re really trying to bring people in.
The top-down decision our union president made regarding ICE and public schools was to send members whistles for their lanyards with next to no instruction on how to use them, just a blanket “this is for reverse evacuation” (which is when you’re outside with your students and you must rush into the school building due to an emergency).
In fact, when ICE descended upon Columbus in December 2025, our union leadership canceled union meetings.
December District Union Meeting: Canceled
January Legislative Assembly: Canceled
January District Union Meeting: Canceled
February District Union Meeting: Canceled
The February district meeting was canceled due to a longstanding event that our union puts on in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. When our union president and I still had an amicable relationship, he told me when he ran, he bought a table at the MLK event.
He and his friends got put at a table in the back, but he went, and it was a specific move to show the establishment you are a serious candidate, even though the incumbents run the show.
So I spent $600 on a table for the MLK dinner. And there was no question in my mind on which dress I was going to choose.
The dinner is not at all for our members. It’s advertised to membership, despite the incredulous price point. It’s also on a school night! Not only was I still in the classroom at this point and had to teach the next day, but I had three building visits booked.
The dinner does not honor Black students and educators the way that it could (and in my white-ass opinion, should). Chris and I talked about, in a world where we won, how we would want to continue the MLK tradition but center it on the Black excellence and joy in our district, at a price point and time that encourages member participation.
Instead, one member is honored (who, hilariously, was one of my biggest haters on the internet during the campaign, and here I am cringing while I charge $600 on my credit card because like most educators I do not have that cash on hand to hear a speech from her) and a handful (and I mean a handful) of student tickets are comped.
The highlight of the evening is the guest speaker, and that year it was Roland S. Martin. He was notably introduced by Joyce Beatty, who said to the audience, (emphasis mine) “Tonight, I hope you remember: we are trying to make you feel empowered, to make you feel that you are important, to make you feel that you have value, and if we stand together, […] and get out the vote, we can change this world.”
And that is just about what every union event I go to is: a massive price tag footed by members’ dues dollars to make people feel important for one night in exchange for their blind allegiance to the Democratic Party political business-as-usual machine.
I wish it wasn’t. It doesn’t have to be. There is another option, but members have not chosen it. Not yet, anyway.
Roland S. Martin delivered a phenomenal speech, and when he called out the hypocrisy in the room: the expensive dinner, honoring elected officials bought by billionaires and AIPAC, not actually doing anything for the sake of liberation, and it all being put on by a teacher’s union, the loudest cheers came from the table in the back.
I spent three years serving on the board for my local union’s Political Action Committee (PAC). It ended up being the catalyst for when I truly split from union leadership. In hindsight, I should’ve split sooner, and nearly everyone I was organizing with was telling me to. Our committee actually lost people because I wasn’t willing to go against him.
I knew that when I made that decision it had to be when I truly felt like there was no other choice. Because I knew there would be no coming back from it, and it’d hurt. I’ve never broken a bone, but I did once take a 30 foot whipper leading a 5.10b in Clear Creek Canyon, which ripped every article of clothing I was wearing along with several layers of skin and shook me so hard I never really recovered.
I knew it’d somehow be worse than that, so I really had to be sure.
I served on the board for our local union PAC for three years. I never missed a candidate screening, I never missed a vote, and I made the motion to financially support a union member running for school board in Pickerington (she won!). When we were screening city candidates on September 20th, 2025 for the upcoming November election, the issue of school vouchers came up.
They first came up with the endorsement of City Attorney Zach Klein. Klein sends his kids to private school utilizing vouchers, which was enough for me to voice that we not endorse him.
One particular PAC board member said she thought we should endorse him. The table had a robust conversation regarding this issue. When it came to a natural close, I raised a question to the member that wanted to endorse him: After hearing the discussion, does that move your opinion at all, or no?
She sincerely responded with: “I just wanted to endorse him because I think he’s attractive.”
She got re-elected to the PAC board this past May. She also serves on our union Governance Board.
I couldn’t bring myself to join the table in laughter at her response. It was a new depth of “Does anyone take any of this work seriously?”
Our members deserve more than that.
Our students deserve more than that.
Our city deserves more than that.
Zach Klein did not receive the endorsement, and there was more to deliberation than solely the utilization of school vouchers.
…But I can’t say the same for City Councilman Emmanuel Remy.
Remy received the endorsement from the PAC Board (though I voted against for separate reasons), and it was mere minutes after the PAC Board meeting ended I learned Remy also uses school vouchers to send his kid(s) to private school.
Not wanting to cause turbulence without proof, I reached out to a well-connected friend to see if he could confirm the allegation. By happenstance, the well-connected friend saw Remy on a rooftop the very next day and popped the question to confirm.
The endorsement approval process is three steps. It starts with the PAC Board, then proceeds to the union’s Governance Board for approval, and finally to the union reps at the Legislative Assembly. I attended the Governance Board meeting to a) give my committee report and b) inform them of the information I had obtained regarding Remy.
The Governance Board had a spritely discussion on whether the school voucher piece mattered for a political endorsement from a PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATOR’S UNION IN OHIO, but what I noticed even more, was this: they disagreed so seldom that multiple people didn’t know that to “abstain” in a vote does not equate to neutrality.
Leadership gave the talking point of “How many of you drive a union-made car?” — A talking point I find incredibly layered and rooted in blind allegiance to unionism instead of worker-power unionism — and used to remind everyone in the room that they’re not as union-strong as they think they are.
It’s a weird way to whip votes, to belittle with a verbal lashing regarding the ways in which a teacher undermines the United Auto Workers on their commutes to their jobs and union meetings, but it works.
Leadership also said school vouchers are lawful in Ohio, and we can’t fault our elected officials for following the law. The Remy endorsement passed our union’s Governance Board.
The caucus I’m in, CORE, had started list-building a few months prior, and I emailed our CEA members regarding the vote that had taken place. The caucus has specific language around school vouchers, and it is every single union member’s right to list-build and communicate with other union members. Here is the email I sent:
Our Governance Board had a pretty big problem with me sending that email. First, they aren’t aware of the democratic rights that union members have, and second, they had a problem with me saying that slavery was law, and that Jim Crow was law, with the context of their political decisions and actions.
In hindsight, perhaps white educators do need a bit more of an elaboration on how the unchecked school voucher system in Ohio propels the systems of society we still have in place from enslavement that are keeping people of color, specifically and particularly Black people, oppressed, and how the underfunding of city schools are a key part of that operation. I’ve made a note to have a blog post in the future dedicated to that explanation.
Union leadership called in Remy’s spouse to speak to the union reps are our Legislative Assembly and convince them to vote for the endorsement. It didn’t work.
Our caucus members had literally no organizing plan for the Legislative Assembly. I had sent the email to some union members, so they knew the issue at hand, and what happened in the meeting happened naturally. Members got up to share their thoughts and made the motion to strike Remy from the endorsement just based on the fact that he uses school vouchers, and the union reps overwhelmingly agreed.
For lack of better words, this made me feel less crazy. I needed to know it was not outlandish to think maybe our educators union should not be backing political candidates that take part in defunding our profession and institutions.
This is, of course, a great game of political hypocrisy of our union, which is covered in my next and final piece of this installment.
But I told members in our union what was happening and I paid the price. I’m still paying the price. Most people think that I’m the writer behind CORE’s The Member Action Tea, but there is truly a team of people behind it, and I’m neither the head writer nor the head editor. I did, however, write this piece about our PAC.
At the next Governance Board meeting, I would get my own verbal lashing from our president, and everyone around the table would agree that I deserved it. They would also go into executive session for 1 hour and 45 minutes and come out with exactly one new business item: to make sure our organizing committee had no communication or meetings without a representative from Governance.
They wouldn’t address it to me, though. They would write it as "all ad-hoc committees” (of which there was only one). However, they also included the directive to the Early Career Educator committee, which is chaired by two people on our slate (and the organizing committee).
The Early Career Educator committee is not an ad-hoc committee, it is a ‘real’ committee, it is listed in our union’s Constitution and Bylaws (the organizing committee is not — or at least wasn’t at the time, Chris and I put up a motion to change that before we ran).
The co-chair of the Early Career Educator committee attended the next Governance Board meeting to clear the confusion with the directive, and when she pointed to the evidence of not being an ad-hoc committee (in our union’s Constitution and Bylaws), she was pulled aside by leadership and told it was a “misprint”.
The rules only exist for some.
The rules only exist sometimes.
Were there other misprints? How much of our Constitution and Bylaws is real? Questions remained unanswered.
My verbal lashing at that meeting ended up being one of the most powerful parts of my campaign pitch. Our local union president told me if I “wanted to change our union, [I] had to do it from the outside and not the inside”. Because that’s what you get with a top-down model of a union, you get a small group of people on the “inside”, and everyone else is on the “outside”.
And I just don’t believe that’s how a union should operate. I don’t believe there should be an inside and an outside, it has to be everyone.
I would explain that as the “fundamental difference” between our current president and myself, it is the base of the understanding of what the union is and how the union should function.
At the second candidate debate night, the last question posed to myself and my opponent was from a member that wanted to hear us say something positive about the other. She said she had seen a lot of negative things on the Facebook Coalition page, and she wanted to know what we admired about each other.
He said “I think she has, you know, she might have some good ideas”. And that was it. He took the rest of the time to talk about himself, and about the work he has done as president.
I didn’t speak about myself. I spoke about his tenacity, I spoke about the strike, I spoke about how I admired his determination to keep going. I didn’t bridge any of it to our campaign.
At the conclusion of the first candidate debate night, we shook hands. After I concluded my remarks, I backed away from the mic, and turned and walked directly off-stage. I did not shake his hand.
I returned to my seat, with my eyes full to the brim with tears, and as they started to shoot down my cheeks I looked at Jacquia.
“He couldn’t say one nice thing about me. He couldn’t think of a single thing.”
“It’s the fundamental difference. That is the fundamental difference.”