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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 16, 2016)
PAGE 6 | September 16, 2016 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS Work shouldn’t hurt, says OSEA Oregon Special Education personnel all to frequently are injured by their students. You might think schools would be safe workplaces, but it doesn’t always feel that way to school employees who work as special education assistants. Ore- gon School Employees Associa- tion (OSEA)—an affiliate of American Federation of Teach- ers (AFT)—represents about 5,700 workers in special educa- tion. By and large they love their work—helping students with significant intellectual and de- velopmental disabilities. But several years ago, some mem- bers were concerned enough about attacks by students to raise the issue at union meetings. The union began to look into it. “We asked our members to tell us if they’d been injured by a student,” said OSEA President Tim Stoelb via email. “The sto- ries began pouring in.” Members reported that they were spit on, kicked, hit, pinched, scratched, and bitten. Most at- tacks were minor, but not all. In 2012, a 68-year-old special ed bus driver for North Clackamas School District was taken bruised and bleeding to a hospital after an autistic middle-school boy bit her multiple times. OSEA had anecdotes, but lit- tle or no comprehensive data on such attacks. Schools are classi- fied as safe workplaces by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), so un- like at factories or construction sites, they’re not required to log and report any injuries that are less serious than fatalities, ampu- tations, in-patient hospitaliza- tions or the loss of an eye. OSEA asked the Legislature to require schools to undertake more stren- uous reporting, but got nowhere in the 2011 session. But in 2013, the union won a partial victory: a law mandating that districts es- tablish some kind of reporting. This spring OSEA and three other school unions—Oregon Education Association, AFT- Oregon, and Oregon Nurses As- sociation—formed a work group to gather more evidence to sup- port a case for action. With help from AFT’s national organiza- tion, a survey was developed that was sent out to OSEA mem- bers in June. About 2,000 school employees have so far re- sponded, and the National Insti- tute of Occupational Safety and Health is preparing a final report of that survey for OSEA. In July, OSEA delegates went to Minneapolis to attend AFT’s national convention, and won passage of a national union res- olution. The resolution calls for Oregon LERA will present a triple-header (plus one) on Nov. 10 educational employers to be re- quired to report employee in- juries to OSHA, and for ex- panded national monitoring of assaults against special educa- tion personnel. “The ultimate goal of the cam- paign is to stop—or at least min- imize—the injuries to our mem- bers,” Stoelb said. “In our data-driven society, nothing changes without strong support- ing evidence. Changing the re- porting requirements will gener- ate the data to effect that change.” If the campaign gets to that stage, better training and better staffing would be two obvious solutions. Oregon actually em- ployed 5 percent fewer special ed workers in 2013-14 than it did in 2006-07, even though it had 6 percent more students with dis- abilities.
