More than 100 Mesa Public Schools teachers picketed in front of a district building and sat in on a governing board meeting Tuesday night to urge officials to raise their salaries in the coming budget year.
“We are frustrated,” said Tammie Pursley, president of the Mesa Education Association, the district’s chapter of the national teachers union and organizer of the protest.

Despite emotional and, at times, tearful pleas from parents and community residents, the Mesa Public Schools governing board voted unanimously to close Jordan Elementary School and turn it into a preschool at the start of the next school year.
Jordan, in the south portion of Mesa’s Dobson Ranch development, has had the district’s lowest enrollment for the past eight years and is expected to lose even more more students in coming years, Superintendent Michael Cowan told about 80 people who attended a Tuesday hearing before the board’s vote.