Frustrated about years of low pay, teachers walked off the job in Kentucky.
And North Carolina.
And Arizona.
And Colorado.
And West Virginia.
And Oklahoma.
Yet for all the money lawmakers have allocated to public education the past few years, Idaho teachers remain every bit as underpaid as many of their colleagues in those states.
Pore over the latest report from the Idaho Center for Fiscal Policy.
In it, you'll see the average salary Idaho paid its teachers in the 2016-17 school year came in at $47,504 - ranked 43rd.
Imagine how that looks in Kentucky, where teachers thought making an average $52 339 and earning the 27th lowest salaries in the country was something to complain about.
Getting paid, on average, $2,333 more than Gem State teachers did not impress educators in North Carolina.
And you can bet comparing unfavorably to Idaho was a huge motivation to complain in Arizona ( average teacher pay, $47,403), Colorado ($46,506), West Virginia ($45,701) and Oklahoma ($45,245).
Even worse, Idaho teachers have been losing ground because lawmakers failed to keep up with inflation.
In real dollars, the average Gem State teacher is getting 6.8 percent less than she did in 1999. Among the 12 states that did worse, you'll find. North Carolina, Arizona, Colorado and West Virginia.
But teachers in Kentucky and Oklahoma managed to stay just barely ahead of inflation.
Nor can Idaho teachers take much comfort from the state's lower cost of living. Notes the fiscal center: You can live more cheaply in 20 states. But you'll find only eight that pay teachers any less.
If Idaho teachers can commiserate with their striking colleagues in those six states, why did they not walk out long ago?
It's not that they're content.
It's just that they've endured so much worse.
Not all that long ago, lawmakers were cutting school budgets, not adding to them.
The highest elected educator, former state schools Superintendent Tom Luna, was at war with teachers. He wanted to undermine their autonomy, undermine their pay grid and siphon money away from salaries and into technology.
Even as voters were repealing the punitive Luna Laws, the Legislature's Office of Performance Evaluations declared the state faced "a strong undercurrent of despair among teachers who seem to perceive a climate that disparages their efforts and belittles their contributions."
When that's in your rearview mirror, anything looks better in comparison.
The state has begun the fourth of its five-year multimillion dollar package to improve teacher pay.
Luna is gone.
The education wars are over.
Idaho teachers may not be walking out en masse - but they are leaving just the same. The first chance they get, many either retire or leap to earn more money in another state.
In any given year, 19.7 percent of Idaho teachers don't return to their classrooms in the fall. The national average is 16 percent.
So many senior Idaho teachers have quit or moved on that your kid's odds of drawing a veteran are dropping dramatically.
In 2011-12, only 17 percent of Idaho's teachers had four years or less experience. Today, that's up to 24 percent.
And as teachers leave Idaho, it's getting more difficult to find qualified replacements. In 2010-11, 2.3 percent of teachers in the Gem State were not authorized to teach in their subject or had undergone some form of nontraditional training.
Now that's up to 4.9 percent.
There's a truce in Idaho education, but it's fragile.
These are the best of times. A surging economy has allowed lawmakers to both expand education budgets and cut taxes.
Once the economy slows, that will become unsustainable.
As soon as lawmakers choose taxes over school budgets, it's not hard to imagine the truce beginning to fray. - M.T.
