Beightol was met by school police officers when he got to work and transferred to the region office pending an investigation.

By Rebecca Wakefield

Last week, about 80 teachers and students flooded the hallways of Michael Krop Senior High in North Miami Beach to prevent school district administrative heavies from hauling off a rebellious chemistry teacher to the bureaucratic equivalent of a whipping in the woodshed.

Shawn Beightol just tried to keep teaching. He had a feeling he knew what was going on outside his door, but didn’t want to do anything to further jeopardize his job. Then a coach came to the door and said, “We got you, man. We got your door. Nobody’s coming in here.”

With the hallway shut down, the goon squad decided there must be an easier hit somewhere else. The principal stuck his head inside Beightol’s classroom. The meeting was canceled. But the fight wasn’t over. Beightol knew his months of inciting fellow teachers to protest low salaries had finally caused the great beast that fed them all to turn on him, snarling.

This is his story, anyway. Not long afterward, I sat with Beightol at a delightful waterfront restaurant in North Bay Village to try to figure out whether he is the brave new face of teacher activism in Miami, or just another budding politician riding a tide.

After all, the United Teachers of Dade leadership, post the era of felonious über-boss Pat Tornillo, is vulnerable. Tornillo was the little big man, surrounded by a comfortable flock that never told him no. So, when he left, nobody knew what to do. It takes time to build an effective political machine from scratch, even in the best of times.

These aren’t those times. The economy of the last five years was dangerously pumped up by the real estate hype. Suddenly, a lot of Miami-Dade teachers realized they couldn’t do it anymore. Adding to the insult, they watched teacher salaries exceed theirs in Broward County.

Without getting too much into the rhetoric of how public education is funded, I think what teachers are worth depends a lot on an individual teacher’s level of education and ability, the working conditions (the size and demographics of the class as well as school leadership), and the subject taught. It doesn’t make sense to pay someone teaching a handful of 6-year-olds to finger-paint the same as a nationally certified teacher pounding math or English into two dozen apathetic teenagers.

But given the implications of salary increases for some 21,000 teachers, the district has to make tough choices. Do you put most of the money into rewarding the veterans who’ve put in their time, or do you use it to retain new teachers? Studies have shown that teachers are most vulnerable to leaving the profession in the first few years. If they make it past a decade, they are pretty much lifers.

This is why Miami-Dade County Public Schools Superintendent Rudy Crew suggested that beginning teacher salaries be raised from a pathetic $34,000 to a reasonable $40,000.

At the same time, the base of union power comes from veterans. UTD has to appease these older teachers, who are understandably pissed off at the idea that they put in 10 or 15 years and would barely make more than the newbies. UTD asked for beginning salaries more around $37,000. All that may change this week as negotiations continue.

Beightol and his supporters have been highly critical of the UTD for not pushing harder on a number of fronts. He has questioned whether UTD’s leadership relies too heavily on its parent union, the American Federation of Teachers. AFT came in and took over UTD management after the financial crash concurrent with Tornillo’s arrest. Beightol wonders whether AFT wants to get its claws into UTD proceeds from selling various assets it owns. I have no idea if that’s true, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all, given the history.

Beightol has been a union member for years, even running for president last time around. He plans to run again next year. But only recently have his criticisms evoked such a response. A couple of months ago, he began sending out mass e-mails to thousands of teachers about the salary battle and related issues.

In one provocative blast, titled “A Hurricane of Neglect in Public Education,” he eloquently made the point that the district is trading long-term gains in teacher quality for short-term wound-staunching.

Teachers are leaving the county, he wrote: “Anywhere but Miami-Dade, where the salaries are the lowest, but the indices of professional stress are highest (highest Limited English Proficiency, poverty levels, drop-out rates, and crime incidents). This financially sloped terrain does not attract sufficient number of high-qualified new teachers to replace the departed. The bias is toward complacency, surrender, laissez-faire defeatism. Toward the shrugged shoulder, don't give a d#$%, ‘good enough.’ But it's not good, and it's not enough.”

Beightol also sent around e-mails suggesting teachers should get more active, by protesting, by speaking out at School Board meetings, and even maybe staying home from school. He sent around a list of administrators making more than $100,000. UTD has also marshaled its forces to pressure the board on raises, but didn’t endorse Beightol’s methods. He in turn says that union President Karen Aronowitz has only recently woken up.

He believes she is a good person, who thinks she’s doing the right thing — but isn’t. “Karen is a weak president,” he told me. “She has no vision. She has no fight. This summer I asked her why she didn’t outline consequences [to the board of not getting the raise]. She said she didn’t want to create a negative backlash.”

Beightol, who is more of a scrapper, thinks a backlash is long overdue. Rather than protecting a status quo that isn’t really working, he claims, “We have to evolve our union to serve professional educators. The current paradigm doesn’t fit our culture or our economy.”

I called UTD, but Aronowitz did not respond by my deadline. I hope she will write a letter to the editor instead.

The chemistry teacher got more response than he anticipated from his e-mail campaign. Hundreds of teachers e-mailed back, and district officials told him to stop sending them. He argued back that others, including School Board members, had sent out political e-mails using the district employee list, so why couldn’t he?

Anyway, it all culminated in the hallway shutdown at Krop High last week. Ceresta Smith, a veteran English teacher at Krop who supports Beightol, told me that a lot of the static between the union and their maverick steward evolved because the leadership saw his pushiness as a personal attack, rather than legitimate frustration. “We are 10 to 12 years behind times in relation to the cost of living,” she says. “We have to push because there’s something badly amiss.”

On Monday, Beightol was met by school police officers when he got to work and transferred to the region office pending an investigation, allegedly for using his school computer to send out his political e-mails. He’s now assigned to the purgatory of a school bus depot cafeteria, where his chemistry skills are no doubt helpful in determining the composition of the lunch special.

“The fact they put him in the maintenance depot, that says it all,” opines Smith. “We pushed Shawn along because he’s very vocal and very bright and now they’re using him as the scapegoat. I guess they figure if they silence him, they silence us.”

Beightol has this sort of scruffy Sonny Crockett-of-education appeal as a somewhat cocky rebel with a cause. He’s a single father who lives on a sailboat, knows where the best chicken wing deals are to be had, and is willing to take risks to make a point worth making.

After he was put in the hole this week, he told me he’s not allowed to talk to the press about all this anymore, but I can’t imagine that will hold him back for long.

“I’m not a hero,” he said. “I’m a chemistry teacher. And I’m scared shitless. I’ll probably get fired and become a plumber. But I’ll keep fighting for teachers.”

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.