Tough Act To Follow
As Joan Husted steps down after 36 years with the Hawaii State Teachers Association, she hands the reins, and an apple, to the new executive director Mike McCartney
By Alice Keesing
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When Joan Lee Husted joined the newly opened King Intermediate School in 1966, she loved the school, her colleagues and her students - but she couldn’t understand why the teachers and the students had to take on the role of janitors every day to clean their classrooms.
“It was hysterical because the kids would have mop fights,” she remembers with a chuckle. “But you’d have to close your class off 20 minutes earlier so kids could clean the classes. They said it was good for the children’s character (and I believe kids should keep their class clean), but it didn’t take me long to figure out that this was cheap labor ... these were primitive working conditions.”
By her own account, Husted has a tendency to run off at the mouth, and the classroom cleaning issue was one of those things that got her going. When the people organizing a new teachers union found out she had collective bargaining experience, it wasn’t long before she was recruited.
Husted became a driving force in the creation of the Hawaii State Teachers Association in 1971 and a pioneer in Hawaii’s labor movement. In the hot and heavy days of the civil rights ‘70s, Husted was a lone woman in a male-dominated world - and a Mainland import to boot. But she went on to become a legendary figure, winning recognition as an outstanding woman leader and a labor leader. After 36 years with the teachers union - the last seven as executive director - Husted retired on Dec. 31, which was also the day she celebrated her 70th birthday.
“I can’t think of an individual who has done as much for Hawaii’s public school teachers as Joan Husted,” says schools superintendent Patricia Hamamoto. “Even though we have sometimes been on opposite sides of an issue, I have the ultimate respect for Joan, her unfailing devotion to teachers and her willingness to fight hard for what she believes is right.”
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Growing up in Michigan, Husted vowed she’d never be a teacher like her mother. (“I watched her work, and I said, ‘Not for me.’”) But when Husted finished her master’s degree at the University of Michigan in the 1950s, she quickly discovered that the doors weren’t open for women in her chosen field of philosophy. So a teacher she became. In the classroom, Husted discovered a joy in working with her students and learned firsthand the challenges and needs of the profession that she went on to fight for as a union leader.
Plenty has changed in Hawaii’s classrooms, thanks to Husted’s work over the last three decades. For one thing, teachers no longer have to clean their own classrooms. They also have paid maternity leave, paid lunch breaks, their own mediation program and member benefits. One of Husted’s most prominent roles has been as HSTA’s chief negotiator. Since 1972, she has been the leader of the war room whenever the teachers fought for more pay or better working conditions.
“That’s a tough place to be; I don’t know how she’s done it all this time,” says longtime colleague and friend Irene Igawa. “I did it for 16 years and, to me, that’s a lifetime of negativity.”
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