She won't give up fight against teachers unions

MADISON, Wis. — Kristi Lacroix still is the unofficial voice of Wisconsin educators fed up with Wisconsin’s once all-controlling teachers union.

Lacroix, as a teacher at Kenosha’s Lakeview Technology Academy, was one of the relatively few educators who stood up for Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial public-sector collective bargaining reforms known as Act 10. Her support cost her during the height of big labor’s unprecedented but failed campaign to recall Walker in 2012.

Her job was threatened through an online movement billed as “Fire Kristi” in which some of her sharpest attackers pledged to ruin her career, her reputation, her life.

Lacroix has survived the slings and arrows of Act 10 opponents. She left the classroom last year to take a position as membership director for the Wisconsin branch of the Association of American Educators, which provides liability insurance and professional resources for educators, without collective bargaining and without political lobbying.

She’s traveling the state these days, working on grants and scholarships and letting teachers know that “there are alternatives and options as far as professional associations.”

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