Our Platform: Unionize ❤︎ Defend ❤︎ Transform
“We don’t have a single day or a single member dues dollar to waste.” Christina + Reilly
About our Platform
What public schools workers want is clear: Fully staffed, vibrant, loving, equitable, integrated public schools for all children in North Carolina, where students can learn and grow to their fullest potential. Public schools where workers can count on full, stable careers with good wages, dignity, and respect. How we get there is what we need to decide together, as leaders in our union.
As candidates for NCAE President and Vice President, we believe that our union has the potential to be the most powerful organization in North Carolina defending and transforming our public schools. And we believe it our duty to become that organization by 2030, in order to defeat the wealthy few who are working to completely privatize our schools in the next decade.
To do that we must UNIONIZE, DEFEND, and TRANSFORM like our students, our schools, and our careers depend on it (because they do).
This draft platform is how we believe we can achieve that mission together. It has been developed through years of campaign and organizing experience at the building, local, and state level. And it has been shaped through dozens and dozens of conversations with union leaders like you over the last four months. We are proud of it and eager to share it, but it is not a finished product. It is a conversation starter.
As union leaders we believe in clearly sharing where we stand right now on key questions about our union’s future. We also believe in our collective ability as workers to discuss and debate as a way to sharpen our ideas. That is how we arrive at our best thinking collectively. “Welcome struggle,” as Christina loves to say. So, we are also eager to discuss it, revise it, and improve our platform with help all of you through more conversations in the coming months.
Please share your feedback with us— tell us what excites you, what you would change, and what questions you have. Please forward this to your NCAE union siblings so we can bring more and more voices into the dialogue. And if you would like to hear about our upcoming platform meetings or (even better) to help us organize one for your local/region, please let us know.