Aiming to have a voice in school decision-making, educators at Latin School of Chicago have voted this week in support of forming a teachers union.
The new Latin School Union, which will represent faculty at all three schools within Latin — Upper, Middle and Lower — is affiliated with the Illinois Federation of Teachers, the IFT said in a Thursday statement.
Tuition at the prestigious private school ranges from $35,430 for students in junior kindergarten through fourth grade, and $39,585 for students in fifth through 12th grades, according to the school’s website.
“We are thrilled to see the results of this vote,” Brandon Woods, an Upper School English teacher at Latin School and member of the union organizing committee, said in a statement.
“We have known for some time that we had to take action to raise our voices as educators to advocate for our students and for learning at Latin. Forming a union was the logical choice for us,” Woods said.
Officials at Latin School could not be reached for comment Thursday.
But IFT President Dan Montgomery said the union, which represents 103,000 teachers and paraprofessionals in pre-K through 12th grade school districts statewide, including members of the Chicago Teachers Union, “is proud to welcome the Latin School Union into our organization.”
“These educational professionals decided that unionizing is the best way to have their voices heard, despite intense anti-union pressure from management,” Montgomery said.
“We applaud them for their courageous and determined work to realize their goals in service of Latin students, Latin’s distinguished legacy, and Latin’s best future,” Montgomery said.
Latin School senior Ashna Satpathy, 18, the standards editor of the school newspaper, The Forum, said she has written about the teachers’ move to unionize and suspects that “once COVID hit, the approval ratings for the administration and school board dropped quite significantly.”
The school was entirely remote at the start of the 2020-21 academic year, then went through various hybrid models and finally resumed full in-person instruction on May 3, Satpathy said.
Satpathy said if teachers at Latin think they are not being compensated fairly, “they have every right to demand that,” but she wonders if any discontent might have been prompted by frustrations teachers faced during the pandemic.
“COVID is not a lasting thing, but a union is a lasting thing,” Satpathy said, adding: “I just hope that the union and administration work together peacefully, and it doesn’t end up costing students, like it did at (Chicago Public Schools), when there was a strike.”
kcullotta@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @kcullotta
