DANVILLE, Pa. – Teachers in Danville, Pennsylvania schools are preparing to walk out on students and the community over union contract negotiations, though union officials won’t discuss the details.

The Danville Education Association, the district’s teachers union, announced it will launch a teachers strike April 17 because the six members of the union’s negotiation team think it’s necessary.

“We felt that we were left with no alternative,” DEA President Dave Fortunato told The Daily Item. “The Danville district is a high-performing district, and schools are the center of the community. Teachers should be rewarded. Teachers should be paid for the noble job that they do.”

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Fortunato said the DEA will strike for as long as is permitted by state law in order to get what it wants at the negotiation table. He wouldn’t, however, discuss the union’s contract demands, which is unfortunately quite typical.

In other words, Danville students, parents and taxpayers will have their lives upended when the district’s 190 DEA members walk off the job next month, but the union doesn’t have the decency to tell the public the reasons for their selfish behavior.

According to state law, “a strike cannot prevent a district from providing 180 days of instruction before June 15 or the last day of the scheduled school year,” the Daily Item reports.

Danville school board president Allan Schappert told the news site the district likely will be forced to push back graduation one day for every day teachers don’t come to work. He said the district’s rising contributions toward teachers retirement system makes the union’s contract demands unrealistic, and was clearly not impressed by the DEA’s decision to strike.

“PSERS (the state pension fund) is killing us and every other school district,” Schappert told the Daily Item. “It’s extremely shortsighted and ill advised to acquiesce just because somebody thinks they’re not being paid enough. This is the hand that we were dealt. We don’t like it either, but we are responsible for making it work as best we can.

“I’m terribly disappointed and disgusted with the whole thing … this continuing escalating of muscularity, like a petulant teenager not getting their way,” he said.

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DEA officials are using the typical union talking points for negotiations, including the often repeated claim that teachers haven’t had a raise in two years. But what the DEA doesn’t tell the public is that most teachers receive automatic “step” pay increases every year, whether they’re effective at their jobs or not.

Like most districts dealing with union strife, what the situation boils down to is a matter of priorities. District officials are working to make the best use of the limited tax dollars at their disposal to provide a quality education for the community’s youth. The teachers union is working to extract the most money as possible from the district’s coffers for its members.

Fortunato may feel his union is “left with no alternative” but to call a teachers strike, but most parents and taxpayers would agree that shouldn’t be considered an alternative, at all.

The obvious alternative is to explain the union’s contract demands to the public – the people who own the school district and pay the employees’ wages – and to continue with negotiations while providing the uninterrupted education students deserve.