‘We say now’: The day more than 25,000 Florida teachers resigned over pay and school funding

Some teachers left goodbye messages to their students on classroom blackboards. Others cleared their desks.

It was Feb. 16, 1968, a Friday, and a sign of what was coming that Monday in Florida: the nation’s first statewide teachers strike.

When schools opened their doors that day a half-century ago, more than 40 percent of the state’s teachers didn’t walk through them.