Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/348932
16 Fall 2014 x AEA Advocate WE ARE AEA! • WE ARE AEA! • WE ARE AEA! • WE ARE AEA! whether we'll win this particular go-around, of course," said Lowes before last year's successful bond and override election. "But it's pretty fair to say that we've made many more friends, and that's what I think will best serve our students over the long run. That's what has me jazzed." Education Votes: What about your students and fellow educators drive you to be so involved? I've been an activist all my life, going back to Vietnam, and civil rights, and Native American Indian rights, and wilderness advocacy, energy politics, water conservation. You name it; I've been involved in a variety of movements and causes for a long, long time. I was a rep in my local association back in the early '90s and mid '90s. Then in 2006, our then-very unsympathetic school board abrogated our long-standing professional agreement. Ever since that time, I've switched over to education activism and essentially made that my main commitment. I want to see my association with a seat at every pertinent table. I believe that our educators – and I represent teachers and all the other certificated staff – are not just the best stewards of education, but the closest to our students and have a bigger picture of what really works in public education. I want our vision to come to the fore, so my ambition is to make sure that my local association has its voice fully weighed in every conversation that matters regarding public education in Arizona. And I want to see that voice spread to all of our ally associations in the Valley. Phoenix Union has 13 feeder districts, and they're important partners for us in all of this. So I'm trying to help weave those voices all together. Education Votes: Why do you think it's important for educators to be involved in government and politics? I'm perplexed by the number of educators who don't believe education should be political. As I look at all the things – textbook adoption, pensions, payroll deduction plans, ethnic studies, employee compensation, academic freedom – I have a hard time seeing how anything that we do, especially in such an environment as Arizona, a rather unfriendly environment, is not political? Politics is not the all of education, but it's an important leg. Education and politics are more or less natural partners in Arizona. It would be terrible if we didn't act politically. Education Votes: What advocacy work do you like most? The truth is, I do like watching my colleagues realize their power. I do like seeing our students see their teachers as models for action. And I love watching our former students – or even our current students – unorganized by us, but organized by their own passions and interests and various groups. I love to see them involved. So I think, in the long run, what I enjoy the most is watching coalitions – young and old, even high school-aged kids – getting involved. And we've seen this happen in Phoenix at a really impressive level. I like watching the ethic of commitment build. Education Votes: How did you get started being politically active? My activism goes back to the mid '70s. I switched to education activism on a pretty major scale when we had an unsympathetic board take away the Classroom Teachers Association's professional agreement. Our PA is the second oldest in the whole country and the oldest in Arizona. And it's an agreement in a right to work state that we have earned over decades of communication and disagreement and dialogue. It's an agreement that's pretty comprehensive, pretty thick, pretty strong. And so when they took that away in Arizona, it was very clear that there was only one way to redress that wrong. Again, it's a right to work state, and we don't have a right to contractual agreements like they do in many other states. Our only recourse is with the ballot box. I remember being at the board meeting when they voted to take away our agreement and give us instead some un-negotiated thing that they called the "teacher's handbook," which we had no part in crafting and little ability to use in teachers' favor. I remember being at that meeting and saying, "Okay, see you guys in November. We will find redress at the ballot box." In one of the campaigns, we had to run a write-in candidate. I thought we might win if we got 25 votes, but I was shooting for 250. In the end, our candidate won by a vote of 1,013 to 8. We put together a pretty major write-in campaign, and my teachers and the school staff arIzOna'S paul lOWeS, COnt. frOM page 15