The West Virginia teacher strike ended Tuesday after they managed to win a promised 5% raise. Kentucky teachers paid very close attention to the strike but mostly on their half-hour lunch break at Big Lots. Some of them only get a fifteen minute break because, between the school day, Academic team practice, and what passes for sleep, they can only work four hour shifts at their second job.
“I wish we had the energy for that,” said middle school science teacher Samantha Day as she pushed pallets of some-assembly-required furniture around the loading bay of the Big Lots she’s worked part-time at for twenty years. She got to rest for a moment when her manager, who was once her least promising student, asked her if she would mind trying to unclog the men’s room toilet.
Kentucky teachers’ union rep Dave Tohl sighed wistfully when he thought about the likelihood of teachers striking for higher wages in this state. “It’s not that we don’t want to,” he said. “It’s just that planning a strike takes a lot of time and Andrea called in sick at Big Lots today. I’m going to have to find a way to break it to my kid that I’m not going to his basketball game. Again. Now I have to get back to making sure these shelves are disorganized.”
“And even if we manage to pull off a strike there’s still a possibility of those substitute scabs,” said elementary school history teacher Michelle Watkins as she straightened a row of whimsical garden tools.
Kentucky teachers barely have time to work two jobs much less work for better working conditions at either. “Honestly, I didn’t even have time to put together a lesson plan for tomorrow,” said high school algebra teacher Jim Brookman as he held up a plastic wrapped DVD set of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. “I mean it’s literature, right?”
Teachers in some areas are affected with the yearning for enough time in the day to strike more heavily than others. The Pike County Board of Education met with Pike County Big Lots management this morning and agreed to construct a border wall between Kentucky and West Virginia so that their employees don’t try to move. It’s the first time in the history of either state that any educated person wished they lived in West Virginia.