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On August 25th, the Tenure Commission will hear the case of Nicole Conaway, a widely loved and respected Detroit teacher, hero in the fight for civil rights and public education and prominent leader in the Detroit Teachers’ Union. On April 12, Nicole was fired by the district in a purely political attack by Detroit Schools Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, in retaliation for her leadership in fighting for public health measures to keep Detroit students, staff and our community safe from COVID-19.  Her termination is in blatant opposition to the interests of Detroit students, and a violation of her rights. The pretext of her termination was the denial of her right to FMLA and ADA accommodation to work from home in accordance with her doctor’s orders.

 

Nicole Conaway represents every teacher and worker unjustly fired or forced to resign, made to choose between their safety and livelihood, every student and staff member with disabilities and health conditions struggling for a safe quality education. She fights for every student and family who refuse to accept that access to public education now has a cost – that you risk your life to COVID with minimal to non-existent safety measures in face-to-face schools.  

 

Last school year students walked out of schools across the country demanding remote learning and COVID safety measures in schools, boldly marching with signs saying “The youth are not disposable”, “Our voices matter” and “Masks are disposable, children are not,” declaring we will not accept a ‘new normal’ of living with COVID! This marked a new phase of independent struggle of the new civil rights movement—a new generation of young leaders who have been profoundly impacted by the movement for justice for George Floyd, the same movement that removed Trump from office and the only force to save lives during the pandemic by taking matters into our own hands to prioritize human life and fight for the truth.

 

As we begin this school year, COVID is the 3rd leading cause of death in the U.S. The dominant BA.5 variant is even more contagious than omicron, infections are rampant, yet our government and school administrations have completely abandoned public health measures. Our movement must mobilize to ensure that every family that wants remote learning receives it along with all the resources needed to learn from home. We must fight for expanded free healthcare, public safety measures (free mandatory masks, vaccinations, regular COVID testing) and economic assistance for all—documented and undocumented. This moment calls for more leaders like Nicole Conaway.

 

ADA Accommodations and FMLA are protections and programs won through the civil rights struggle to protect the health of workers. In the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, the DPSCD administration is treating these protections as weapons to discipline teachers, aides, and other workers and attempt to force them into unsafe working conditions. The continued COVID pandemic and the resulting increase in long term illness from COVID infection require a massive expansion of these rights and protections. Instead Superintendent Vitti is using the pandemic to decimate them. Anyone who has been wrongfully terminated and or denied accommodation, penalized for being sick or quarantining, contact BAMN to fight.          

 

Nicole Conaway’s history as a civil rights leader

 

Nicole has taught science and math in Detroit public schools for 16 years. She concluded early on that it was not enough to be a good teacher, that providing her students with the education and opportunity they deserve meant becoming an activist and leader and empowering her students to become leaders. She joined the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights, and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), and is a founding member of the rank-and-file EON/BAMN caucus within the Detroit Federation of Teachers. She organized an occupation with her students that successfully stopped the closing of her school Catherine Ferguson Academy, an outstanding high school for pregnant and parenting young women.

 

Detroit has been ground zero for attacks on public education, and privatization experiments and schemes. Nicole was a prominent leader in the citywide teacher sickout in 2015, and walked out and marched with her students in the fight that defeated the dictatorial regime of emergency managers in Detroit schools, restoring our democratic rights. This struggle for equal quality public education, and for democratic control of our schools, our unions, and our governments has been brought to a head by the urgent life-and-death nature of the COVID crisis.

 

The leadership of Nicole Conaway and BAMN in Detroit’s struggle to save lives from COVID-19

 

In Summer 2020, Superintendent Vitti announced he was opening summer school in Detroit, while most other districts remained closed. Like other majority black and Latino cities, Detroit had already been ravaged by the virus, but Vitti and the school board were more intent on forcing parents back into the COVID-ravaged auto plants and other workplaces to “get the economy running” than they were in protecting the future of Detroit students and families.  Nicole and BAMN made clear we were not going to allow Detroit students to be guinea pigs testing the safety of reopening.

 

BAMN led community actions that blocked buses to shut down in-person summer school. Nicole was a leader in this action. She was at the schools blocking the buses and interviewed on television news on the need to close the dangerous summer school program. She was a named plaintiff in BAMN’s lawsuit that won a Federal Court order forcing DPSCD to test all students attending summer school for Covid-19 infection.

 

Our protests and lawsuit gained national media coverage. Our victory of mandatory testing set the national standard for the minimum prerequisite for reopening. Immediately, parents started withdrawing their children from summer school and their concerns were confirmed when the testing showed positive COVID cases. Mandatory testing gave families the crucial information they needed to stay safe and led a majority to choose virtual learning. School districts across Michigan and the US began announcing they would be fully remote in the fall term.

 

Vitti, who was of course vehemently opposed to testing, went on a Trump-style demagogic Twitter rant stating that he was “bashing BAMN” for our protests. At a district-wide staff meeting he threatened to arrest and terminate anyone who participated in the protests. Despite his threats, teachers, students and staff, with the leadership of BAMN and Nicole Conaway, continued to fight and refused to go back. Teachers voted 91% for a safety strike with massive support of the community. This resulted in an agreement in which teachers had the option of remote teaching for the 2020-2021 school year. The majority of teachers and students chose virtual. This undoubtedly saved many lives.  Superintendent Vitti rightly saw this as a defeat for his policy of reopening the schools no matter what the cost in human lives.

 

Frustrated with the refusal of Detroit to go along with the reopening, Vitti has attempted to coerce, threaten, withhold resources, sabotage virtual learning, to get people back in the buildings. The opening of schools as ‘learning centers’ was based on exploiting and discriminating against support staff. The paraprofessionals, special education aides and other staff who work the most closely with students were never afforded the same option for remote work, despite the great need for virtual support for teachers and students. This has inevitably had a disproportionate affect on our most vulnerable students and communities, students with special needs, English language learners and immigrant families.

 

Nicole and BAMN organized protests with support staff against the dangerous conditions, demanding the right of all staff to work from home and equal treatment and protection of special needs students. Last year, Nicole testified in the Michigan Employment Relations Commission (MERC) trial of LC Bulger, a DPSCD Special Education Aide and EON/BAMN leader who was terminated in October 2020 after the district denied his FMLA request. Mr. Bulger’s termination was also in retaliation for his activism in the community and within his AFSCME Local 345 to protect students and staff during the pandemic. Mr. Bulger has been with the district for over 20 years and pioneered the Special Olympics program in Detroit. His termination has been a great loss to Drew Transitional Center and to the students and staff of DPSCD. A victory to reinstate Nicole Conaway will pave the way for reinstating LC Bulger and the many dedicated staff who have been forced out during the pandemic.

 

Superintendent Vitti’s gross abuses of teachers and staff are fundamentally an attack on the youth of Detroit, part of the national attacks on public education, civil rights and democracy. Nicole Conaway’s termination is an arrogant overreach by Superintendent Vitti, the DPSCD administration and the corporate and billionaire interests to bully the people of Detroit to accept policies we would never accept. In Nicole’s own words “Dr. Vitti is doing no different than the emergency managers, and just like the emergency managers he needs to go.”

 

With every attempt to fully reopen, Nicole and BAMN have been in the way, exposing outbreaks at schools, informing students and staff about their rights, urging people to stay home and fight for their right to stay safe, holding car caravans, pickets, mobilizing the community to demand the only safe policy: no one returns until its safe for everyone to return, all student receive the resources and support they need to learn from home – including economic assistance for their families. Our struggle has meant Detroit has still had to continue to provide students a virtual option when many districts no longer do. This is a victory of our struggle.

 

Nicole Conaway’s termination demonstrates animosity towards her by Superintendent Vitti and the majority of the DPSCD School Board

 

During Nicole’s case, we will have the opportunity to put Superintendent Vitti on trial when he is called to the witness stand to answer for his scandalous policies.

 

In Fall 2021, the district started looking for a way to get rid of Nicole. The only virtual option was the separate virtual school, relegated to second class education with overcrowded classes, and without elective classes. Teachers were required to report to the virtual building in person 2 days a week where they would share a room. Nicole applied for FMLA and ADA accommodation to teach from home 5 days a week in accordance with doctor orders due to her health conditions that put her at severe risk if she were to get sick with COVID-19. She was wrongly denied FMLA and wrongly denied her ADA accommodation. The administration then threatened her with termination. In response, Nicole filed a lawsuit and began a public campaign calling for other similarly situated staff to join.

 

Throughout the fall term, COVID cases surged even higher than the previous year, and actions of teachers, staff and students closed many schools with COVID outbreaks. More students switched into the virtual school.  Detroit was one of the few urban districts in the nation to start the January 2022 school term with remote learning. During that time Ms. Conaway taught 11th grade Earth Space Science class virtually to CMA high school students. She immediately assumed her role as building rep, calling a union meeting at CMA and organizing teachers to file a group grievance against the unsafe conditions in the school. Walkouts were spreading around the country against the terrible, dangerous conditions in schools, demanding remote learning.

 

When schools reopened, still in the middle of the worst COVID omicron surge, Nicole again requested to continue teaching her students from home. Despite the growing need for virtual teachers, Vitti chose to fire her, rather than grant her reasonable accommodation. This was in flagrant opposition to the interests of Detroit students and a violation of her rights.

 

The political strength of Detroit, BAMN’s history of struggle and leadership, the immense solidarity and support for Nicole, and the political motivation of the attack against her was clearly evident at the March and April school board meetings where her termination was on the agenda. In these meetings the school board carried out the same anti-democratic and anti-student/teacher role that has been followed by every appointed takeover board that preceded them.  They appear to believe that the role of an elected school board is to demonstrate its loyalty to billionaires and corporate interests and its fundamental opposition to public education in just as fawning a manner as any appointed takeover board or emergency manager. This is a scandal.

 

At the March school board meeting, the vote on Nicole’s termination was postponed at the last minute as it was announced Vitti would not be able to attend the meeting. In response to the outpouring of support from teachers, students, community members, and Detroit City Council member Gabriela Santiago-Romero  (a former student of Ms. Conaway), the Board began to cut off the microphone of speakers who mentioned the name Nicole Conaway. The next day, Nicole appeared on the news speaking out against the school closings calling for Vitti to be removed.

 

At the April 12 Board meeting, both Superintendent Vitti and Board member Sonya Mays intervened in the meeting to argue for Nicole’s termination, unabashedly showing the political motivation behind her termination. In an unprecedented move, Superintendent Vitti shockingly violated Ms. Conaway’s right to privacy by arguing that Nicole’s medical condition is NOT a condition covered under FMLA. This is not only blatantly false but also makes clear that Superintendent Vitti took a very personal stake in terminating Nicole.  Even with that, the Board could not achieve a unanimous vote for her termination, since one school board member Sherry Gay-Dagnogo had the courage and sense to vote against her termination. In the end the decision to terminate Nicole was made on a split vote.

 

Nicole has a right to this hearing in front of the Michigan Tenure Commission because the labor movement won the right for tenured teachers to have protection for free speech. This is exactly the situation in which tenure protections are key. Public education is this nation’s most important gain for real democracy, won through the struggle for black equality from the Civil War and Reconstruction through Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement. 

Protection of the ability of teachers to tell the truth to their students and families is central to the preservation of those gains. We have the opportunity now to strengthen this protection, for Nicole Conaway and for all teachers.

 

Nicole represents the unity of teachers, students, school workers and the community in struggle, understanding that students are the most powerful and boldest force, most often fighting from the standpoint of how things should be, and not accepting and adapting to how things are. It’s why she was targeted for termination, and it’s why we can and must win her reinstatement. As we face unprecedented attacks on public education, democracy and a deepening political crisis, we must defend our leaders, and build BAMN in our schools in every city, and EON/ BAMN caucuses in our unions to put the new independent civil rights movement in the driver’s seat of history.

 

Join our BAMN Tribunal every Saturday 1pm EST / 10AM PST bamn.com/COVIDTribunal

Sign & Circulate the Petition & send letters to the Board: Please sign both
Change.org Petition: https://chng.it/cYn5pwG2HF
BAMN Petition: https://forms.gle/DXXapWLECcnjZ6o16