STRONGSVILLE, Ohio – Last spring hundreds of educators found the courage to cross angry picket lines and provide instruction to K-12 students in Strongsville, Ohio while their regular teachers were out on an eight-week strike.

But since the strike ended, the regular teachers who walked out on their students are back in everyone’s good graces, while the replacement teachers are being treated in a shameful and inexcusable manner.

It started a few months ago when the president of the Cleveland Teachers Union filed a lawsuit to gain the names and addresses of all of the former replacement teachers. His obvious intent was to have them blackballed at public schools throughout the nation, as punishment for crossing the picket line.

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But that’s not the worst of it.

Earlier this week Strongsville school administrators mailed a letter to each of the former replacement teachers, thanking them for their service but telling them they won’t be invited to serve as substitute teachers in the district in the future, according to Cleveland.com.

Thankfully the school board has learned about this travesty, and is planning to meet and take action to stop their administrators from treating these people in such a shameful manner.

School administrators apparently believe that banning the former replacement teachers is crucial to keeping peace in the district.

“We believe that this is a necessary step to continue to assist our district in moving forward in a positive direction,” Assistant Superintendent Cameron Ryba said in the letter to the teachers, according to the news report.

In other words, the unionized teachers don’t want the replacement teachers around, and the cowardly administrators are bending to their will.

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Talk about leaving your wounded soldiers to die on the battlefield.

Strongsville administrators asked these people to come in the middle of the school year and provide service to their students under the most difficult of circumstances.

They were expected to pick up where the regular teachers had left off, with no preparation. They were harassed and insulted by the strikers and their supporters. Their neighbors were handed leaflets, announcing that “scabs” lived nearby.

School administrators should have anticipated the problems that the replacement teachers would encounter, and should have pledged to help and support them in any way possible after the strike ended.

But instead of getting support from the district, the teachers are being sacrificed at the altar of the greedy, vindictive teachers union.

Can this story get more sickening?

As it turns out, the school administrators sent the letters to the former replacement teachers without informing the school board.

Board members are reportedly enraged, and may have a special meeting as soon as tomorrow, presumably to correct the action.

“The board needs to figure out how to correct this,” said school board President David Frazee, who was informed of the letters by a newspaper reporter. “We are all in agreement that this not the way we would treat someone who put their neck out for us.”

Thank goodness someone in Strongsville has a sense of fundamental decency. But we wonder what Frazee meant when he said the board would have to “figure out” a way to right this obvious wrong.

The school board runs the district. It can and should order the administrators to immediately write another letter, apologizing for the first letter and inviting the former replacement teachers to substitute in the district.

And the regular union teachers should be told that any attempt to mistreat the former replacement teachers when they work as substitutes will not be tolerated, period.

The replacement teachers were there when the Strongsville district needed them. Now it’s time for the district to return the favor.