-By Warner Todd Huston

Proving once again that we live in an overly litigious society, a teachers union in Belleville, Illinois has decided that instead of working through the regular channels to fix classrooms and to eliminate mold and dampness caused by building maintenance troubles, they had to stampede straight for the courts to get it done. The lawsuit came as a shock to school administrators who were in the middle of discussions with the district as well as the union to address the problem.

The News-Democrat gives us the details:

Belleville Federation of Teachers Local 434 filed a complaint Wednesday asking a St. Clair County judge to force District 201 to test the air in Belleville East buildings.

Union spokesman Rich Hodson said Belleville East classrooms have poor circulation, which has caused mold to grow on desks, chairs and ceiling tiles, and has led to levels of carbon dioxide of around 3,000 parts per million, three times what is considered to be safe for prolonged exposure.

But District Super Greg Moats was surprised by the resort to the courts and said that the Illinois Dept. of Labor had only weeks before determined that the air quality in the classrooms was fine. He was also curious why the union suddenly ran to the courts because only the Friday before they had met with the union to discuss remedies to the situation.

“We sat down with them last Friday and said we agree that this would be fine,” Moats said. “All we wanted was a mutually agreeable third party to do the testing.”

Of course every resident of the state of Illinois wants the air quality in schools to be optimal for students and teachers alike. But, why appeal to the courts when the issue was not being ignored by the administration?

It’s hard to escape the feeling that these union members were just looking for an “issue” with which to make news. The Belleville teachers are some of the highest paid in the state, and they recently updated their contracts, so it shouldn’t be because they are looking for new issues to up their pay scale!

For their part, the union claims that the Il. Dept. of Labor’s readings were skewed because the school administration had left windows and doors of the classrooms open “all weekend” so that when readings were taken the conditions would be “unusually favorable.”

One of the stumbling blocks is that it seems union officials are demanding that their own handpicked testing service be used to test the air again. The administration is worried about a sweetheart deal between the union and their picked testing agency and want a mutually agreed upon, unconnected third party to do the testing.

If determining the safety factor of the workplace is the goal, it’s hard to understand why the union won’t accept this solution? So, why is the union taking this unnecessary step to involve the courts? Is it just that unions traditionally refuse to ever work with employers?

We’d all like to know.

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