Teachers Walk Out In Virginia, Citing $750 Mill Amazon Tax Break As Schools Struggle
Citing $750 Million Tax Break for Amazon While Students Suffer, Teachers Walk Out in Virginia. "While legislators in the Virginia legislature debate giving enormous handouts to Amazon for HQ2, public school teachers struggle with less than adequate school funding, low wages, and more." Common Dreams, Jan. 28, 2019.
Fed up with plummeting school funds and low teacher salaries in a state that recently offered hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks to one of the world's richest companies, unionized teachers and their allies in Virginia traveled to the state capital on Monday to demand state legislators begin fighting for them and students instead of for powerful corporations.
The grassroots group Virginia Educators United and the 50,000-member Virginia Education Association (VEA) urged teachers to take a personal day to lobby state lawmakers and demand more funding for school renovations, teacher pay, and supplies. The call was answered by thousands of educators and supporters, who met on the steps of the capital in Richmond with many chanting, "Fund our schools!"
The state, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten told the Guardian, "is prepared to prioritize corporate tax breaks for Amazon over the needs of public schools. That's not right." "Like the shortfalls for education West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Los Angeles, Virginia would need to invest $1 billion in order to return to its pre-recession funding levels," she added. Instead, Northam has offered a $269 million funding package for schools—about a third of what the state is giving Amazon. -More...
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/01/28/citing-750-million-tax-break-amazon-while-students-suffer-teachers-walk-out-virginia
- Teachers from all over Virginia rallied in Richmond on Monday to demand more state funding for schools.
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