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.