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Compassion? No, that would violate the rules

2 min read

Labor unions have suffered plenty of wounds over the last 40 years or so, some of them self-inflicted.

Though the notion that they are teeming hotbeds of corruption largely vanished around the time Jimmy Hoffa did, labor unions are still sometimes perceived as being fiercely, reflexively protective of malingerers or incompetents who should instead be looking for other types of employment, and the enforcers of rigid workplace rules that, in certain instances, have no practical value or merit.

A union representing teachers in Steel Valley School District, which serves students in the Allegheny County communities of Homestead, West Homestead and Munhall, has done everything in its power in recent weeks to reinforce the latter impression.

In February, Steel Valley Education Association filed a grievance against the district, complaining that a student with special needs at Park Elementary School in Munhall was allowed to use a bathroom reserved for faculty on the facility’s ground floor. According to the Associated Press, the grievance underlined that the district had to provide “lavatory facilities exclusively for employees,” and that “the bathrooms that have been designated as faculty bathrooms shall be exclusively used by the faculty.”

The student who had been using the bathroom, 10-year-old Kaitlin Montgomery, suffers from chronic lung disease, pulmonary hypertension, has problems with her feet and is autistic. Without being able to access the faculty lavatory, Montgomery would have had to go outside and climb a flight of stairs to get to a bathroom for students – a task that would be simple for most youngsters, but cumbersome for Montgomery, if not utterly impossible. These issues, or even simple compassion, never seemed to figure in the union’s calculations. The rules are the rules, they seemed to say, and they must be followed to the letter.

Initially denied by the district’s superintendent, who correctly noted the school was mandated by federal law to make allowances for students with special needs, the school board for the Steel Valley district swatted away the grievance in a unanimous vote Thursday night.

Shawn McCallister, the president of Steel Valley Education Association, told the board that the grievance was filed not to obstruct Montgomery from going to the bathroom but to produce “a better outcome for all involved.”

The only outcome, though, was that McCallister and his associates now look stunningly obtuse and staggeringly tone deaf.

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