Young, St. Petersburg unionist teachers use a podcast to open labor dialogue

The year was 1968. It was springtime in Florida and teachers were fed up with Florida’s First Republican governor since Reconstruction, Claude Kirk. Negotiations between the Florida Education Association or FEA and state leadership had failed. Soon, 27,000 teachers left their job in one of the nation’s first statewide teacher’s strikes.

“Teachers from Florida didn’t just walk off the job. They resigned,” Mike Gandolfo, teacher, and former Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association (PCTA) president, said. “They were so incensed by the conditions in the schools and they were grossly underfunded. It’s pretty much similar to what we’re going through now.”

The strike lasted three weeks, with 40% of teachers walking off. Some never got their jobs back. By 1974, collective bargaining was ratified into the state constitution, but at a cost—no striking without risking their pension. Fifty-five years later, teachers are trying to survive under another far-right Republican, Governor Ron DeSantis.
A local cohort of young educators decided to speak out. St. Petersburg High School teachers Philip Belcastro and Brennen Pickett debuted the PCTA’s FYRE podcast in January. The show is part of PCTA, Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association, and FYRE, Florida’s Remarkable Young Educators. Pickett also serves as a county rep on the Florida Education Association’s governance board. He chairs FYRE, along with Belcastro, a co-chair. They talk to other union members weekly about why the union matters and what teachers face.

“Phil and I started going to the school board meetings last semester. We were up there screaming about raises,” Pickett told CL. “We noticed that no one was going out to these things.”

Pickett’s wife, an educator, suggested he start a podcast with Belcastro to bring more people into the union.

“So trying to get people out to these things has kind of been like our initiative because we’re trying to get outside the echo chamber,” Belcastro said. “But it’s not just unions anymore. It’s the voucher thing. It’s the pay. It’s the inevitable bottoming out.”

Creative Loafing Tampa Bay sat in on their weekly taping just before Spring Break at the PCTA and PESPA (Pinellas Education Support Professionals Association) union hall. Pickett, Belcastro, and first-year teacher Ramsey Aziz spoke with Gandolfo for the show.

“What are the benefits of having union representation, such as PCTA, negotiating for us rather than just having the district do it for us?” Pickett said.

The focus of this episode was on collective bargaining. That’s in light of the Desantis-requested SB 256 that seeks to dismantle the teachers union through strict membership requirements, among other rules. Or SB 244, dubbed the “teacher’s bill of rights,” which seeks to supplant wage negotiations outside a teacher’s union. Gandolfo was PCTA president from 2014-2020 and continues working to bring in more members.

“The district is going to do what's best for the district, and you hope that they want to do what's best for students,” Gandolfo said. “But sometimes they need reminding.”

Gandolfo said that not having representation means the district will likely do what’s fiscally responsible. He points to Wisconsin, which gutted its teacher’s unions in 2011. Within two years, educators lost over $10,000 through cuts to healthcare and retirement. And in Florida, the district can’t lobby the public to support referendums that come from local taxes.

“The district can’t say, ‘Hey voters, vote for this because they’re the recipient,’” Gandolfo said. “They can’t do that. We do it.”

Hillsborough’s educational referendum failed last year—with the Tampa Bay Times recommending voters go against the measure—leaving a $150 million gap for the district. Meanwhile, SB 256 seeks to undermine what power teacher’s unions still have. Stuff like preventing dues from being collected from their paychecks and limiting the distribution of union materials.

“It’s a kill union bill, and when you kill the union, you kill the collective,” Pickett said.

Pickett told CL that he dropped off union literature at a local middle school recently, where they didn’t even know a union existed. And under the pending legislation, that could get even worse.

“Education is one of the biggest parts of the budget in the state, so the state would love to cut that out,” Gandolfo said. “Just give everyone $8,000 a year and say we’re gonna throw it into the free market economy.”

Public schools have to provide education for students with disabilities under federal law. Private schools don’t have to follow the same rules. Many teachers and parents warn that defunding public education leaves the most vulnerable students with the fewest resources.

In 1968, when 40% of teachers left the job due to poor working conditions, Florida was 37th in public education funding. As of 2019, Florida ranks 45th in the country for student funding from the state.

“Ron DeSantis keeps talking about teachers and education, but he's not talking to teachers,” Ramsey Aziz told CL.

And the fight has made its way to the Pinellas County School Board thanks to recently elected Moms for Liberty-endorsed and Desantis-backed school board members Dawn Peters and Stephanie Meyer—complete with attacks on the LGBTQ community, curriculum censorship, and now banned books.

“The school board is making many mistakes right now,” Aziz said. “We've got a loud minority trying to attack educators and education.”

The onslaught of legislative intervention in public education is one thing. And Florida teachers may not be able to strike legally without risking their pensions. But for some young educators, the promise of retirement can feel hazy.

“I think it's a legislative conspiracy to make this atmosphere so toxic that you guys are thinking about leaving,” Gandolfo said. “And we’re losing our best and our brightest.”

So what keeps them in the profession that remains under daily attacks by the current administration? The students, the podcast, the union. Each week the FYRE podcast does its “based awards” to end the show on a high note. They talk about what brought them joy each week, in or out of the classroom.

“Doing the podcast and the camaraderie between us motivates me, too,” Aziz told CL. “With all of this Doomer stuff, if I was alone in a vacuum and maybe rougher school, I'd already been out.”

Regarding getting people involved, Pickett and Belcastro’s approach seems to be working based on last month’s five-hour-long school board meeting with 56 speakers. For now, PCTA’s FYRE podcast is creating space for educators to talk about the challenges of each day in hopes others might tune in.