Mom crossed the line.

In one of the strange moments of my early days as a reporting intern at The Detroit Free Press, I was covering a teachers’ strike that had spread to several school districts in Michigan. And while walking the hallways of a high school, I looked in a classroom and there was my mother doing what she did — teaching.

There would be no picket lines for my mother or father. They were both teachers at a time when the profession was still, for some, a calling.

I can remember students at our dining room table, getting extra help willingly offered by my parents at an hour when most people were settling in for an evening with their TVs or power tools.

Striking was, for my parents, a betrayal. But they also came to the profession with the willing acceptance of a hard tradeoff — great personal satisfaction, but salaries that were abysmally low. Shirts with collars turned and jackets patched not out of fashion but necessity were part of the working wardrobe. Snorting junkers were the teachers’ ride.

A lot of years later, conditions are obviously better. Teacher pay has gotten downright comfortable. Teachers are often seen showing up at school in some very nice wheels. Benefits are wonderful. And there are the summers.

But there has been a high cost for the relative prosperity. It is the gradual erosion of that special place teachers used to hold in their cities and towns.

It usually shows itself in the late summer when parents start telling stories of how they have had to reorder their lives because children who they expected to be in school are not.

There are scowling, finger-jabbing citizens who point to hard times in their communities while teachers exploit their unique hold on the most important service those communities provide.

And there are the teachers themselves who, as a professional group, seem to have the public relations sense of deer ticks. They seldom seem to consider who might be listening when they choose to bemoan their hellish days on the job. The irritation can last for days.

And, of course, they go on strike sometimes, knowing they are risking absolutely nothing because they will still be required by state law to work the same number of days. And days lost in September are recovered in June. They’re not really putting a whole lot on the line. None have gone to jail in a long time.

Every year, the teacher strike or strikes of the season seem a little more tedious, a little more tacky, a little more out of touch.

They go on strike and provide one hell of a civics lesson for their students. They and school committees perform a mad, down-to-the-wire ritual made possible by the complete failure of anyone to impose limits and deadlines.

A friend suggested to me that it would probably take simultaneous teacher strikes in Providence, Pawtucket, Warwick and Cranston — while the legislature was in session — to force some kind of sane negotiating policy to be imposed in Rhode Island.

I wouldn’t be a teacher if they paid me. The dizzying array of social problems that walk through the schoolhouse door every morning is an added burden that I can’t imagine having to deal with on top of daily lesson plans. And a good teacher is still as rich a resource as a community can have.

But it seems a disconnect has taken place. There is a sad irony in the fact that, the closer teachers have come to being paid what they’re truly worth, the farther they seem to have moved from the people who foot the bill.

bkerr@projo.com