Job cut tsunami hits Elgin U-46 school district

Deep cuts were inevitable and now we are seeing it happen as the first waves of cuts start trimming away both good and bad elements of schools and government bureaucracies.

Elgin School District U-46 in Illinois just announced they will be cutting teachers and staff in order to get their finances in line with what they are taking in as revenues. They are looking at cutting over 1,000 positions, 732 of them full-time teaching jobs. They should be commended for taking a very hard stand that is not popular, but necessary. Earlier, Kansas City announced the closing of half their schools. This is only the beginning of a big Tsunami I predicted. “It has to happen. It is inevitable.” (http://wistechnology.com/articles/7107/ )

Parental and taxpayer observations on the Elgin cut that appeared in the local Illinois newspaper, the Daily Herald(http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=366186 ), ranged in their sentiments:

We have all known for years that we could not afford the salaries and benefits for school teachers and administrators.

Most districts are in debt, pensions are under funded...but unions kept pushing for more, more, more year after year. If one district got a raise...others cried poor and demanded raises. For years and years I have been saying that administrators have been way overpaid in school districts, but everyone sat back and did nothing, including teachers. I think teachers are underpaid. I also think many people in the corporate world are underpaid as well, however, and people in the corporate world have taken pay cuts, lost benefits, etc. We have had our property taxes raised and raised and raised over and over again, and not necessarily seen a great return on our investment.

Now some would side with the teachers and school administration with the worn out line that teachers are “underpaid and overworked” but we never see the numbers that are behind the salaries and raises.

In the case of District U-46, how did they get to a point where it was a crisis? Funny, how news reporters don't dig deep enough to uncover the raises and pay hikes. They did publish all the names of the teachers who were going to get laid off which really leaves me to question their journalistic integrity, but I will save that for another time.

POLITICALLY CORRECT IS NOT POLITICALLY ACCURATE

Pay increases have gotten ridiculous. It's time to wake up and smell the Starbucks. If money was thought to grow on trees, the forest was being cut down acres at a time for raises.

Here is something that I did not see in the articles I read. District U-46 has had some great pay raises for both their teachers and administrators in a five-year period. The latest information from a site that tracks all Illinois school districts (http://www.thechampion.org/article.asp?id=1073 ) show:

DISTRICT U-46

Average One-Year Pay Increase	Teachers	Administrators	Inflation (CPI)
1998/1999 - 1999/2000	6.8%	8.8%	3.4%
1999/2000 - 2000/2001	10.3%	9.7%	1.6%
2000/2001 - 2001/2002	11.0%	11.9%	2.4%
2001/2002 - 2002/2003	9.2%	9.0%	1.9%
2002/2003 - 2003/2004	8.8%	8.9%	3.3%
2003/2004 - 2004/2005	7.7%	8.4%	3.4%

Average Three-Year Pay Increase and Estimated Pensions:	Teachers	Administrators	Inflation (CPI)
1999/2000 - 2002/2003	29.0%	30.4%	5.9%
2000/2001 - 2003/2004	25.8%	28.7%	7.6%
2001/2002 - 2004/2005	21.4%	23.8%	8.6%

This is an eye-opener and pretty outrageous. Really outrageous like pigs at the trough.

29% for 3 years of raises for teachers and over 30% for administrators? It would be nice to see a chart on how many National Merit Scholarship winners they produced or full scholarship winners in any category - music, sports, academics in those same time periods.

Here are some individuals from that data base, but I have left their names off. As you can see the 29% represents an average, some got less, but some got substantially more :

Name	2001	2002	2003	2004	Yrs. Exp.	Increase
X	31,489	37,586	41,253	45,430	5	44.3%
Y	64,685	69,052	82,211	93,976	29	45.3%
Z	33,565	42,406	42,453	48,582	8	44.7%
A	51,072	57,191	62,180	78,100	12	52.9%

High raises also mean the future tax burden for pensions based on 75% of the final salary is going to be that much more as well. How many in the private sector get 75% of their final salary as a pension?

What was your raise last year? Or the year before? Or the year before that? Maybe you had to take a cut in order to keep your job.

No teacher will take a wage freeze, let alone a wage cut to try to save some of their fellow teachers who were laid off. It's pay me, pay me, pay me.

With politicians and school administrators trying to please everyone with promises and rosy speeches, most school districts are closer to the Elgin tidal wave of cuts than what most parents think. Better start cutting back now before the Tsunami hits.

BLUEPRINT FOR REAL CUTS

The priorities are all wrong with some of the proposed cuts that I have seen in these school districts because ALL levels should feel the austerity program and not just the bottom rung teachers with the least seniority.

Cut back some of the Assistant Superintendents as well as the high-paid, but no class-time desk jockey jobs like “curriculum development coordinator” and “communications coordinator”. Does a school district need a six-figure transportation director to coordinate buses?

Band, orchestra and sports are NOT frill classes. They should not automatically be top on the list to cut. They teach culture, discipline, team dynamics, good habits and other character traits that are not going to be learned in math, science or English.

Real cuts mean real money has to be cut out. One of the easiest ones to institute is NO ROLLOVER of SICK DAYS. That is a no-brainer, but ask a senior teacher about it and they are counting on that as their “last year” to milk the system.

Sick days accrue every year and if a teacher does not take them, by the time they retire they have about a whole year's worth of days that they simply tack on and say, “Pay me this year, I will be sick for the whole time.” This is a complete waste of money and should be one of the first things to be eliminated on a statewide basis - no exceptions.

Why should a teacher get paid for accrued sick days from thirty years ago? If you don't use them, you lose them. They do that in the private sector.

If the salary back thirty years ago was $12,000, why should all sick days be paid out today at $90,000- $120,000 salary levels? It makes no sense and should be a top priority in any state that has this type of insane benefit.

Other cuts should be reviewed. Pensions paid out to people that move out-of-state should be also adjusted by “cost of living”. This is the phrase always used by unions asking for more and more money because of the “cost-of-living” in Illinois, New York, New Jersey or where ever was high. Well it cuts both ways. If a school employee retires to a sunny state that has a cheaper cost of living, they should send back 20% of the pension back to the state they earned it in.

UNFAIR?? Not at all. They are taking all that money out of circulation from the state they made it in. They go live in a state where the taxes are cheap because they don't pay their teachers or government employees anywhere near what a Chicago, New York, or Boston area employee makes. So they don't need as much.

Austerity programs are never easily accepted. Ask any working family who have had to make cuts due to loss of job, loss of income due to having to take a lesser job, paying higher property taxes, and so many other hidden costs that don't seem to affect those making 4-5 times the inflation rate in yearly raises.

Platinum contracts begin to corrode real fast when there is no more money. Teachers AND administrators should take a 20% cut. That would help out U-46 and compared to the raises that they got in years past, that is not asking that much. To use a phrase they have used so many times, “Do it for the children.”

Carlinism: Taxpayers are overworked and underpaid, not teachers.

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