Fargo Public Schools’ teacher of the year Beth Ekre was barred from attending a reception for award winning teachers at the state teacher’s convention because she isn’t union.

You know when the teacher unions talk about having better education as their primary objective?  Don’t believe ‘em.

BISMARCK — North Dakota’s new Teacher of the Year was barred from a reception held to honor top teachers because she declined to join the North Dakota Education Association, education officials said. One denounced the move as “hurtful and vindictive.”

Beth Ekre, a sixth-grade teacher at Carl Ben Eielson Middle School in Fargo, showed up for the Oct. 23 “celebration of excellence” social at a Fargo hotel, hours after her selection as North Dakota’s Teacher of the Year was announced at an NDEA instructional conference.

The event was intended to honor award-winning teachers, including the new teacher of the year and the North Dakota winner of the Milken Educator Award, officials said.

Just think: If North Dakota wasn’t a right to work state, Beth Ekre wouldn’t even have been able to choose not to be in the union.  And in non-right to work states, if the national unions get their way and pass the horribly misnamed “Employee Free Choice Act” and remove secret balloting from the labor organization process (and they almost certainly will get it passed if Democrats get a bigger majority in Congress and the White House), people like Beth Ekre who don’t want to be in the union would be left vulnerable to threats and intimidation from union thugs like this clown.