A Wauwatosa teacher wanted Scott Walker to stop talking about her nearly a decade ago. He's still at it

Molly Beck
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Gov. Scott Walker is shown during a 2018 campaign stop in Waukesha.

MADISON - Scott Walker has again ignored a request from an award-winning Wauwatosa high school teacher to quit using her name to make a point about collective bargaining — nearly a decade after she first said she wanted the former governor to stop.

Wauwatosa East High School English teacher Megan Sampson earned national attention in 2011 when Walker first used her experience of being laid off from her first teaching job in a column published in the Wall Street Journal defending his work to effectively end collective bargaining for public school teachers.

Sampson said then, and again in 2015, that she didn't want Walker to cite her experience to champion the law known as Act 10. But eight years later, Walker is still ignoring the teacher's wishes even after leaving the governor's office.

In a column published Thursday in the conservative Washington Times and in a radio appearance last week, Walker again cited Sampson's layoff from a Milwaukee school under a last-hired, first-fired policy that existed in many teachers' contracts until Act 10 banned them. 

A spokesman for Walker didn't answer whether he first sought permission from Sampson.

Sampson also didn't respond to a request for comment from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel but told the newspaper in 2011 she was hurt that her story was "being used to make me the poster child for this political agenda."

Since then, Walker cited her story four times in his 2013 book titled "Unintimidated" and on the campaign trail during his unsuccessful presidential bid in 2015. 

Sampson told the Associated Press in 2015 Walker "does not have permission from me to use my story in this manner, and he still does not have my permission."

Sampson was laid off from her first teaching job in Milwaukee Public Schools after winning Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English's initial teacher of the year award in 2010.

Her departure from the district was the result of a policy included in the district's contract with its teachers at the request of the teachers union, in which seniority decides who gets cut in times of layoffs, no matter how great the skill of younger members.

Megan Sampson removes books from her classroom at Milwaukee's Bradley Tech High School in 2010 after receiving a layoff notice from Milwaukee Public Schools.

She was one of many young teachers laid off by MPS when the district issued 482 layoff notices. After applying to other districts, she landed a job teaching English at Wauwatosa East, where she still teaches.

Sampson told the Journal Sentinel in 2011 her phone rang four times during evening parent-teacher conferences after the column using her name was published, and that she received more than a half-dozen calls from news reporters. 

Walker detailed Sampson's experience in an appearance on a conservative radio show based in Washington state on May 14 and in his recent Washington Times column quoted a passage about Sampson in his book largely recounting his effort to eliminate such senior policies.

"But why on earth would they get rid of a great new teacher like Ms. Sampson — especially in Milwaukee, which is one of the most troubled urban school districts in the nation?" Walker wrote. "Well, under the collective bargaining rules, when there are layoffs the last teachers hired were the first to be fired."

Contact Molly Beck at molly.beck@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @MollyBeck.