Endorsements 101: How teachers unions made their school board candidate recommendations

Last week, the RoundTable reported on school board candidate endorsements made by unions representing teachers and staff at both District 65 and Evanston Township High School.

The ETHS Teachers’ Council recommended Monique Parsons, Leah Piekarz and Mirah Anti for board seats, while the District 65 Educators’ Council (DEC) endorsed Sergio Hernandez, Mya Wilkins and Omar Salem.

Many RoundTable readers reached out over the past week to ask how the endorsement process worked and which teachers had a say in those discussions. To give voters a better sense of what that looked like, we talked with teachers and union representatives to find out how they made their decisions.

District 65

On Saturday, March 18, representatives for all five unions within District 65 affiliated with the Illinois Education Association (IEA) met to interview the candidates for school board and vote on making official endorsements, according to teachers involved in the process who spoke with the RoundTable.

Present for the interviews were all five union presidents, the union representatives and several notetakers.

Each union was supposed to have two people involved in the discussion and voting for endorsements, but a few individuals did not show up, leaving the endorsement committee with seven or eight total workers, according to IEA representative and ETHS teacher Bill Farmer, who helped run the interview and voting process.

The presidents decided collectively that they would not vote, Farmer said, which meant the majority required for a candidate to receive an endorsement was either four or five votes. All five unions still had at least one representative involved in the endorsements.

In addition to a 20-minute interview with each candidate, where the unions tried to get a sense of the candidate’s support for public education and key union issues like working conditions, among other things, the endorsement committee also received written questionnaires from candidates.

“They [the voting union representatives] reviewed the questionnaire. They interviewed the five candidates all on the same day, and then, afterwards, they had discussions to debrief on the interviews,” Farmer said. “And then I just walked them through a voting process where they voted on the five candidates, and candidates receiving 50% support or higher were considered endorsed.”

With about 750 members, the teachers union for District 65 is much larger than the other four school support and safety unions. In local endorsements like this one, each union tends to put forth an equal number of voting representatives so that one union does not completely outweigh the others in terms of voting influence, Farmer said.

Union presidents normally pick the members who participate in the vote, though Farmer did not know exactly how each endorsement committee representative got involved in this particular process. Typically, unions will put out a call for anyone interested in participating, he said, but other District 65 teachers told the RoundTable they had not received any word ahead of time about when the endorsement meeting was taking place.

“Trying to be as transparent about the process is one of the most important things. I know that sometimes the communication around this isn’t always clear to members, or they don’t quite understand until after a decision has been made,” Farmer said. “It’s a local president’s determination of how they want to endorse a candidate, and how they consult with their leadership team.”

ETHS

In the past, the ETHS Teachers’ Council, like District 65, has involved support and safety staff unions in the endorsement process, but they were not able to participate this time, according to ETHS teachers union President Rick Cardis.

As a result, about 15 members of the teacher union’s executive committee, including classroom teachers and counselors, ultimately held the discussions and vote for endorsing board candidates on Wednesday, March 15.

“The way the process worked is we created a questionnaire, which we shared with all of the candidates, and all of them responded to our questions,” Cardis said. “We shared those responses with all 330 of our members. And then we conducted a survey of our members so that they could give us feedback on their preferences and questions or comments they had about the candidates and anything that came up on the questionnaires.”

The union also has all-membership meetings once per quarter throughout the year, and the latest meeting earlier this month featured a two-hour discussion about endorsements and school board elections, he added.

The union’s current priorities and key issues involved concerns surrounding student engagement, in-school truancy and the hiring and retention of a diverse staff that includes more teachers of color, according to Cardis. When it comes to the school board itself, though, he said the union really would like to see more robust debate during board meetings about key topics surrounding student wellness and academic progress.

“I think we’d like to see a school board that is asking more questions – not criticizing the administration – but just asking more critical-type questions and critiquing the different programs that are being put forward,” Cardis said. “I don’t want to see a contentious school board. I don’t want a school board that is trying to tear things down, but just one that is having more robust discussion.”

Note to readers: As a nonprofit the RoundTable does not issue endorsements nor publish others’ endorsements. We may, however, report endorsements by a group or public figure as news.