MEDFORD, Ore. – A teachers’ strike may be the highest form of selfishness that education “professionals” are capable of, but that doesn’t mean some good can’t come from them.

Last February, most members of the Medford Education Association engaged in an 11-day strike because they were unhappy about the terms of their labor contract.

Medford school leaders minimized the learning disruption to their 13,000 students by hiring a slew of substitute teachers to keep the schools open. The total cost of the strike came to $2.055 million, according to MailTribune.com.

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Those expenses included salaries and expenses (lodging, meals and traveling) for the substitute teachers, payments to security personnel, stipends to administrators and other school employees who worked longer days and weekends during the strike, and normal salaries for Medford teachers who crossed the picket line.

Even with all those expenditures, the district actually saved $69,000 each day of the strike – by not paying AWOL teachers their usual salary – for a total of $725,000, MailTribune.com reports.

The difference between what the emergency expenditures cost the district and what MEA members make every day suggests Medford’s unionized teachers weren’t as woefully undercompensated as they claimed.

During a recent school board meeting, Medford officials announced they were using the strike savings to purchase various supplies for students and classrooms, and to complete several maintenance projects that have been languishing on the district’s to-do list.

The extra money is a nice ending to the ugly teachers’ strike, but it doesn’t make up for the high-quality instruction time that students lost when their teachers were on the picket line. It’s impossible to put a price on all the learning students missed out on.

And that’s an outrage.

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From kindergarten through high school, American students are only in school for 2,340 days (give or take a few). For students to lose any of those precious few days due to a labor union snit is inexcusable.

We’re glad the Medford School District survived – and even financially thrived – during its first-ever teachers’ strike. But we hope taxpayers see the bigger picture, which is that organized labor should have no place in our public schools.