Talk Straight

Wisconsin School District Docks Pay of Teachers Who Skipped School to Attend Protests…or we teach because we love the kids…no really…okay..it’s about the money.

The Port Washington-Saukville School District will dock the pay of 82 teachers who skipped school last Thursday to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s budget bill in Madison, Supt. Michael Weber said Tuesday.

The absences, which left the district without about 43% of its teachers, essentially crippled the school system. Administrators were forced to close the high school 1-1/2 hours after students arrived because there weren’t enough teachers to staff classrooms.

Other schools remained opened, but principals scrambled to find enough substitute teachers to supervise the more than 800 students at the middle school. Parent-teacher conferences scheduled for Thursday had to be cancelled.

The teacher absences shocked school officials and parents, who said they thought the Port Washington-Saukville School District would be the last place to experience a mass exodus of teachers because of the remarkably good relationship between the district and union. The district was one of only a handful in this area of the state forced to cancel classes because of teacher absences.

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Good for them.  And if the teachers remain AWOL, I say cut them another check and attach it to a pinkslip.

Potential Pricetag for Wisconsin’s Protesting Teachers: $9 Million…or teaching the kids— to milk the system

Wisconsin’s McIver Institute has been closely following the developments in Madison over the last week as government workers rally to protect their collective bargaining privileges against state budget cuts. But as teachers have abandoned their classrooms to picket at the state capitol, the state’s taxpayers are the ones paying the real price.

In Milwaukee, public school teachers who skipped out on work to engage in the protest have earned an estimated $3 million while not teaching students in Wisconsin’s largest school district.

Similarly, in Madison, a school district closed for three days due to teacher shortages, the district stands to lose about $2.7 million. To close the school on Monday alone, McIver estimates the school district paid more than $900,000.

If all the teachers in Milwaukee and Madison are paid for the days missed, the protest related salaries for just the state’s two largest districts would exceed $6.6 million dollars.

Using a figure of $100,005 for average teacher compensation in MPS and an average yearly workload of 195 days, these teachers cost approximately $513 per day in salary and benefits to employ. Spread over 5,960.3 full-time licensed teachers in the district, this adds up to $3,057,634 in daily expenses.

The average teacher’s total compensation in Madison is $74,912, according to the Department of Public Instruction. Each day costs $384.16 per teacher. The district has 2,370 teachers.

These figures don’t include administrators and support staff, many of which got an unexpected paid days off thanks to the week’s protests.

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Screw these self-centered POS’s.  It’s time to do what Reagan did with the air traffic controllers and just pink slip every one of these turds that refuse to go back to work.  I’m sure there are plenty of out of work teachers that would love to have a job in this economy.

Wisconsin Teachers Make a Little More Than They’re Letting On…or We teach cause we love the kids, that’s why we haven’t been in class for over a week now

Wisconsin’s public school teachers and the unions that represent them are saying budget cuts proposed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker would be devastating — but many of those teachers make more money than they’re letting on.

Wisconsin’s 2010 Teacher of the Year, Leah Lechleiter-Luke of Mauston High School, told CNN the budget changes would force her to look for additional part-time work.

“When people say that public sector employees live high off the hog, I’d like to share that for 13 of my 19-year teaching career I have held a part-time job either in the summer or teaching night class at the local technical college,” Lechleiter-Luke told CNN. “In addition to tightening the belt even more and crossing our fingers that nothing breaks, I will need to find part-time work again.”

Lechleiter-Luke makes $54,928 in base salary and $32,213 in “fringe benefits,” which include health insurance, life insurance and retirement pay.

Brad Lutes and his wife, Heather Lutes, told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz that Walker’s budget would hit them twice as hard.

“Having to explain to an 8- and 10-year old that the governor of your state basically wants to take money away from dad and mom? It’s just really, really frustrating,” Brad Lutes told Schultz.

He makes $49,412 in base salary with $27,987 in fringe benefits and his wife makes $50,240 with $9,413 in benefits. That’s $137,052 annually between the two of them.

Jim Nelsen, a teacher at Hamilton High School in Milwaukee who attended the union protests in Madison, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he thought it was “time we had to move and we did.” He earns $62,877 in base salary with an additional $26,492 in benefits.

Julene Flanagan, a fourth-grade teacher at Story Elementary School in Milwaukee, said the reason she attended the protests in Madison was because she cares “about the children deeply” and about the “future of public education in Wisconsin.” Flanagan makes $48,406 in base salary and $37,600 in benefits.

Chris Fons, a social studies teacher at Milwaukee’s Riverside High School, said the union protests in Madison are a “bottom-up” movement, and that the “people have been acting and the leaders are following.” Fons earns $58,976 in annual salary with an additional $25,646 in benefits.

Teachers in the state are only contracted to work part of the year, too. Most teachers start their work year around Aug. 30 and end around June 3, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. They also get vacation time during the student breaks, like during Christmas, fall vacation and spring vacation. Year-round, teachers in the state are out of the classroom for about 13 or 14 weeks.

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Dem’s mislead on Social Security-again

In Wisconsin and Kentucky House races, the Democrats are attempting to mislead voters into believing the Republican candidates support the privatization of Social Security — despite evidence to the contrary.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is up with an ad attacking Republican Sean Duffy in Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District, but the spot mischaracterizes Duffy’s position on Social Security. While Duffy has made some ambiguous statements in the past, he has never said he supports a privatized Social Security system, and in fact has recently said just the opposite. 

In Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District, the attack line is similar — and equally wrong. Rep. Ben Chandler’s latest ad says Republican Andy Barr “wants to privatize Social Security and gamble it in the stock market.” But Barr has never said he supports privatization. Barr clearly says on his website: “I will oppose plans to privatize Social Security.”

On top of that, the DCCC’s ad tries to frighten seniors by saying that under a privatized system, they could have lost “nearly 40 percent of their retirement benefits” when the stock market collapsed in 2008. That’s ridiculous, and could only have happened in a system where 100 percent of beneficiaries’ money was given over to Wall Street. Recent proposals to let individuals have optional private Social Security accounts would let them invest only a portion of their payroll taxes, meaning the rest would have been perfectly safe, and one plan currently being discussed guarantees against any losses by investors.

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