With just under a month until the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) election, Belmont Education Association (BEA) President John Sullivan reaffirmed his bid for the statewide union presidency.
Sullivan is a 30-year special education teacher at Belmont High School and a Belmont native. He has served as president of the Belmont Education Association for 11 years, and as a member of the MTA executive board for the past six.
He is running alongside Gayle Carvalho, an English teacher at Quincy High School who is vying for the vice presidency. If elected, Sullivan’s two-year term will begin in July.
“I chose to run because I felt like our statewide union was pivoting away from the core of our work around teaching and learning, and that we need to recenter and push more decisions out into schools to better two-way communication between members and the MTA,” Sullivan said.
He added that as president of the BEA, he visits buildings across the district every week to check in with educators and union members about their needs.
“I think we need to do a better job of asking members what their priorities are,” he said. “I think we need to have board members meeting with their presidents at the local level to find out what’s going on in each local so that decisions aren’t made in isolation at the statewide level.”
A graduate of Belmont schools, Sullivan began volunteering with intellectually disabled students in high school. His involvement propelled him toward a career in special education, where he now teaches in the same school where his interest was first sparked.
“Taking a group of students, helping them learn who they are, and then developing a toolkit so they can succeed and then graduate from high school and go off and do whatever they want to do, is a good thing to do,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan has been called “a very effective advocate for his union” by School Committee Chair Meghan Moriarty.
“He’s very passionate about the work he does. I’m not too surprised he’s trying to take the next steps and move to the state level,” she said.
The BEA has been locked into contract negotiations with the Belmont School Committee for about 18 months, and recently entered into state mediation in hopes of reaching an agreement for the three remaining bargaining units.
The BEA and School Committee meet every two weeks.
“While meaningful differences remain, we are hopeful that mediation will continue to support forward movement. We remain mindful that any agreement must be both fair to our educators and sustainable within the budget we have been allocated to support our students,” Moriarty said in a March 20 negotiations update.
Sullivan said the ongoing negotiations will not impact his candidacy.
“I would have preferred negotiations to end or to be settled at the beginning of the school year, and I tried for that, but it just didn’t work,” he said.
The MTA will hold its election at its annual meeting on May 8-9, where delegates from across the state will cast ballots for the next cohort of union leadership.
