CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) Mary McIntyre has spent the past five years working to represent teachers in Albemarle County, while also serving as a full-time reading specialist at Journey Middle School.

Now, the Albemarle Education Association president will get to do that work full-time – and it happens at a critical moment for the organization.

The AEA was awarded a grant by the Virginia Education Association and the National Education Association allowing her to take a one-year leave from her teaching position to focus full-time on her union work.

“This will give me the time and space to really help represent our members better and advocate for them and empower them,” McIntyre told Cville Right Now. “Availability is huge. There are so many meetings and conversations that I needed to be in that I couldn’t be in because I was in my classroom. It’s going to make me available to work more closely with the school division on things like getting our first contract ready to go and answering questions. It also really gives me the time to help members with their issues.”

That was work that was hard to balance with a full-time teaching position.

“I’ll be doing things I’ve been doing on top of my regular job, which has been really, really hard,” McIntyre said. “Working a full-time teaching job and then also doing all the business of the union meant that before school, after school, during my planning time, evenings and weekends, it was just all being taken up by union work. And I love the union work, but it was not sustainable to do it that way.”

The AEA, which won the right to collective bargaining in April 2024, is in the early stages of negotiating its first contact.

That will be one area of focus for McIntyre in the coming months, but she has other goals once her full-time work begins on Aug. 1.

The AEA grew its membership to about 800 this past school year, up about 200 from the year before. McIntyre wants to continue that growth while also spending more time visiting the division’s 26 schools and departments, training union representatives, and increasing the organization’s social media presence.

Those were some of the reasons the statewide and national organizations chose the AEA to receive the grant.

“Their membership growth is amazing,” VEA spokesperson Olivia Geho said. “They’re really focusing on making sure members feel empowered and on bringing new people in. We think Mary McIntyre is just fantastic. She’s a great leader and surrounds herself with people who are really great at what they do. And they work really well with their community.”

Albemarle becomes the seventh school division in the Commonwealth to have a full-time education association president, joining Arlington, Chesterfield, Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William, and Virginia Beach, McIntyre said. Geho noted that not all six of the divisions that already had full-time presidents had received VEA or NEA funding. Some fund their president’s salary through membership dues.

Geho said the VEA declined to reveal the amount of the grant.

The AEA was awarded the same grant four years ago for former president Vernon Liechti as the organization began its push to win collective bargaining rights from the school board.

McIntyre said that grant allowed Liechti to do the work to help the AEA on the path to its current position.

“We would not be where we are now in the bargaining process,” McIntyre said.

A military spouse, McIntyre said she has been a believer in teachers unions since working overseas in Germany, when the union helped her resolve an issue she was dealing with while working for the

“When I left I said, I’ll be a union member forever, wherever I work after this,” McIntyre said.

She became active in the AEA when she became a union representative in 2020, as schools were dealing with COVID-19.

“When the pandemic happened, I think we all were really concerned about our safety, we were concerned about staff health and student health,” McIntyre said. “We felt like things were moving really, really quickly without a lot of information.”

McIntyre then spent two school years (from 2022-2024) as the organization’s vice president. She is in the first year of a two-year term, now, as president.

A 15-year teaching veteran, McIntyre said stepping out of the classroom, for at least the upcoming year, is the right move for her, the union and the schools.

“It wasn’t a difficult decision for me because I feel like I’m still going to have a positive impact on the experience of the students, just in a different way,” she said. “When I’m taking care of our staff, that does directly impact the experience of the students in our buildings.”