Cool organizing at Robeson High: An interview with Dan Reyes, Part 2
This is the second part of an interview I did with teacher and organizer Dan Reyes about the organizing he and others did at his high school in Philadelphia around facilities issues. Check out the first part here.
Reyes
Our building committee made a whole campaign plan from the beginning. We were moving up the ladder of escalation, and that was really important, because we had a clear roadmap, we knew what we're going to do at each step. And that also showed our co-workers, and then the rest of our school community, that there was a plan here, that we're not just doing this one thing and stopping, which is really important to maintaining momentum.
People who work in the school district are really used to just seeing these one-off actions and then it just disappears and nothing happens. So we started having conversations with parent leaders who are involved in our school advisory council (SAC). And we had a couple joint meetings with parents and identified a couple parent leaders who were really energized and ready to jump into this campaign.
DB
So, was that part of the escalation plan?
Reyes
Yes, the first part was organizing staff and then leveraging our staff organization to begin organizing alongside parents. So then we worked with the parents to develop their own petition, and we did phone banks of staff and parents together. Our goal was a supermajority at each stage. We were thinking of one signature per student. We have a little under 320 students, so we needed a super majority of 250.
The phone banks are really powerful with parents and staff together, also because it becomes part of rebuilding parent organization at our school, which had been inconsistent, just a few people here and there, but no real structure to it, which I think is true at a lot of schools, especially with school choice atomizing everybody. And all of our parent leaders were working class Black women, so we had a chance to build those bonds of solidarity, and we had some incredible organizers, some of whom had union experience.
DB
Amazing.
Reyes
Right, so we were able to reach a supermajority of signatures on the parent petition and our next escalation that we decided to do was a march on the boss, and this is where we got our first bit of coverage from the Inquirer. Oh, and I should say that, at the same time we were doing the parent petition, students were running their own petition.
DB
I was wondering about the students.
Reyes
Students saw what we were doing and they're like, “we want to do something!” So we explained what we did and then they took it and ran with it.
DB
Do you remember the exact moment one or a group of students realized this?
Reyes
Students have been talking about this issue for years. I think also, for them, coming back into the building was a jarring experience. Because after being out of the building and then returning, it’s like “oh great we're back…also wow this is terrible.”
DB
They saw the building with new eyes, maybe.
Reyes
Yes, they were seeing their school building after the Black Lives Matter uprisings. I think that a number of our students’ consciousness got raised around the potential for direct action. So there was energy that wound up ultimately coming from our National Honor Society (NHS) group, which is what ended up being our body of organic student leaders. That’s just the way that it shook out in our building: the NHS is was where all of our leaders were most highly concentrated. They were sort of the spark; they weren't the only ones leading it, but then they were sort of like the driving force behind the student organizing part of it. They ran with it and developed their own project. Once they hit a supermajority of students on their petition, we put together a team of students, parents, and staff.
DB
Wow.
Reyes
It was about ten of us. We did the march on the boss. We went to 440 [Broad Street, the District Central Office] after school. We called the press in advance and had press there.
We went into the lobby. We asked the folks at the entrance to contact Operations for us and it was really funny: they didn't know who to call.
DB
At the front desk you mean?
Reyes
Yes, it was awkward. Reggie McNeil is the Director of Operations, but they sent down Oz Hill, who is the Deputy Director. He walked down and was a little stuck obviously because suddenly he had to deal with this crew of people who had prepared statements and had a stack of petitions. We gave them a week to respond to us and it was cool because you have people going in and out of 440 who were watching and thinking, “wow look at this.”
We got good press from that. It was very energizing for everybody. Then one week later our principal got an email from Reggie McNeil!
DB
You sent a message.
Reyes
Exactly. He met the deadline to the day a week later, just as we'd demanded. In his response, he asked for a smaller meeting, as they do. So he met with a parent representative, staff representative, and our principal to discuss things.
DB
Did he set conditions for that meeting or did you negotiate them?
Reyes
We agreed to send a delegation, but in advance of sending it, we were all clear: we understood that they wanted to meet with a smaller group because they wanted to shift the energy out of this mass organizing project. They wanted to reduce us to a smaller group that they could negotiate with. We were clear, from our side, that we participated in the smaller meeting just to reiterate our demands and see what he says rather than negotiate any outcomes in that meeting.
That was one key thing: we always maintained clarity about where our power comes from, and understanding that small one-on-one negotiations is not where our power comes from. We understood that our power comes from the fact that we're organizing in numbers.
So at that meeting, at first, the district officials were asking questions about the building. And that's when we'd learned that there was a possibility of getting our demands met through a specific kind of money. They called it grant funding. I don't really understand why it's called grant funding, but they said it’s for updating electrical and facilities issues.
DB
Interesting. I imagine that it's coming from the city grant or the state grant. That probably means that they're not having to take out a bond or it's not coming from newer bond revenue.
Reyes
Yes. It turns out they've been doing electrical upgrades around the city. We knew it was happening at other schools, and they were like “Oh, well, we might be able to put you on the list for this grant funding.”
DB
How about that!
Reyes
We were like, “okay great.” Then we waited a couple weeks to hear back and we weren't hearing anything. Our parents, students, and staff started saying “let's keep the pressure up by doing a rally after school.” We wanted to leverage our support from elected officials, because another thing that had been happening behind the scenes was that, with each petition drop, we would testify at school board meetings. Then we had [School Board Chair] Joyce Wilkerson visit our building. After the staff petition, I forgot to mention this, Joyce Wilkerson came by and a couple other board members. We also had members of City Council asking questions of Reggie McNeil at budget hearings and other related things like that. We’d created those connections too.
So we wanted to use this rally to tie all the threads together, the things we had been doing for the whole year. Then, as we were planning the rally, we started getting updates. The first update was a verbal confirmation from Operations Executive Director Jeff Scott that we were getting electrical upgrades and air conditioning. That was a message that came to our principal. But none of us believe anything until it's in writing, and even then, I don't really believe it until I walk into my classroom and I turn on an air conditioning unit and it stays on and it cools the room. Then I believe it. But you know, we won't know that until next year.
DB
That’s the timeline they gave you?
Reyes
Yes, that they're supposed to be installed later. But we didn’t get that timeline until right before the rally we were planning to pressure them for confirmation. Just before the rally, we finally got written confirmation that this summer our electrical will be upgraded, that ACs will be installed in every room, and they're going to be window units. Again, we have to wait to see what happens. But at the same time, we saw things actually happening: operations workers were suddenly all over our building, doing stuff literally every day, like fixing lighting that had been unrepaired.
DB
How about that, all of a sudden everyone's so busy.
Reyes
Exactly, they were all over the place.
So we had our rally. It was great. We had Council members Jamie Gauthier and Helen Gym join us to speak, we had student speakers and parents speakers and staff speakers.
DB
This is the rally that at first was going to be the pressure action, but became the celebration after you've gotten that confirmation about the timeline?
Reyes
It was a celebration, but also kind of a reminder: we will believe it when it's done. We're not letting it sit, we're not just going away. Because our building needs a lot of beautification. Honestly, in an ideal world, we'd get a whole new building. We don't have a library, we don't have a music room or music staff. We’re able to provide a good academic program and we are able to provide some extracurricular programming through our partnerships with universities like Penn. But you know, then we have to rely on Penn for stuff that should just be part of the school.
So we had that celebration, we had this win, and I think the things that have come out of it is that we have parent leaders who are connected to our local union chapter. We have student leaders too: most of the students who were involved in organizing this were sophomores and juniors and then the freshmen were pumped.
DB
So now there's a couple of years’ worth of organizing they can do.
Reyes
Exactly. So that was really neat and I think what's important is that having a well-organized union chapter really unlocked a lot of doors. I think you could probably start this as a parent organizing project and move into staff, but having the staff on board is a strong way to start.
DB
You get to leverage a lot more relationships that way.
Reyes
And having a couple key organizers that were there to basically organize the union and help other people organize the union. Also, it’s important having socialists involved as rank and file organizers. We really made a big difference.
DB
That's really interesting.
Reyes
So I think the next steps we're thinking about are, first, does our air conditioning work next year? Is it cool? We know from other buildings that it doesn't always happen, so we're going to be attentive to that. We're also ready to take action if it doesn't work. I think we've raised the expectations of everybody, including the district. They are afraid of us.
But also we want to share our organizing lessons with other school communities and other union chapters. We did this without the support of our union leadership. We did this as Robeson PFT. We did not have the support of our union leadership, they never once reached out to support us. I think that's because they're extremely focused on their legislative agenda. I one hundred percent support my union's legislative agenda. It's the right agenda for the most part. But you need muscle on the ground to back it up!
DB
How do you think legislation passes and gets enacted and enforced?
Reyes
Right.
DB
It's because you have the power of your rank and file behind you.
Reyes
Right, exactly. The thing is: we showed with our organizing that there's money. The grant funding was there, apparently; the staff was there to do all this beautification work; we just had to make noise. You know, if every school was demanding it all at once, how the district would do that is a legitimate question. But if every school is demanding it all at once, what else can we win at a larger scale? So I think that's the big question for us: how do we make sure that we actually get what we're demanding, how do we push beyond it, and how do we help other schools?
They just sent out a whole list of all the schools that don't have adequate air conditioning. How do we support those schools and those union chapters and those parent and student groups in using these organizing techniques to navigate and target parts of the district bureaucracy? So that they can win immediate relief for terrible working conditions, but also so that we can build power? In this next round for example, we’ll probably have to fight school closures.
DB
Right, that seems like it's coming.
Reyes
Yeah, it's coming, and that's something that we're paying attention to as well, because we've done all this work, but the fact is we're sitting on prime real estate, and now they're putting money into it. But if they were to ever sell the building they could make that money back easily.
We're right in the Market Street corridor. We’re surrounded by enormous buildings going up. So we're sensitive to the fact that we could still be relocated or closed entirely and consolidated.
So as a first step, to fight that, you have to be organized as a school community to make common good demands and then connect those struggles across schools. That’s an important prerequisite for fighting any of the other fights. To really give our schools the upgrade they need, especially in this planning process—I think there's a way to equitably plan for facilities, but the district hasn't shown that we can expect that, as a baseline. So we have to be organized at the school level to come out on the other side of this process with a district that has higher quality buildings, evenly distributed across the city, so that kids, no matter what neighborhood you're in, have a school building that you can go into that's fully staffed and is not going to take years off your life or any school worker's life.
***
Postscript. On 7/13, Dan sent me this photo of his classroom. An air conditioner had been installed.
