Maybe if school boards actually spent their tax dollars on the schools....
And I put some of the blame on teacher unions. They're strong lobbyists who get a lot of things for their members that most of us would kill for. Then when the boards have to make their budgets, where does it go? Free eyeglasses, fully paid for dental and health plans, pension plans....
This is not to say teachers don't deserve even more than what they make, because I think they do. But their pay scales, combined with tenure-related bennies, eats up budgets and then they end up having to do things like this.
In our state, the NJEA decided, and the legislature agreed, that "laypeople" would no longer be hired as classroom aides or teacher assistants. Districts had the option of grandfathering tenured employes.
This meant that either other teachers or people who got college certification as teacher aides(taking college classes and passing the state test) were the only choices.
Teachers in our particular district started out at about $25K a year with a Bachelor's degree. But aides started at just over $8 an hour-less than $10k a year. With the new ruling, those aides that couldn't be placed elsewhere were let go and replaced with mostly teachers, so salaries out of the budget more than doubled. And, of course, the coffers of the union got bigger since dues are based on salary. Nice, eh? Teachers were NOT happy, both those that got placed in classrooms as the aide and the teachers that got them because it became an attitude of competition.
All of this had the board of education scrambling to cut costs elsewhere. Teachers were already buying supplies. WTF? Back in the day, we looked forward to the little stack of school supplies we would find in our desks and the teachers didn't have to pay for any of it. From my kids' first day of school, we would get a list of what they had to bring, including crayons, markers, rulers, etc.-things that used to just "appear".
I was shocked at the end of my first year at the school where I worked when I saw garbage can after garbage can filled with text books-and probably the same textbooks kids were told they'd have to pay for if they didn't return them at year's end.
Is this teacher having to pay for his own test copies? That's nuts.
/me shakes her head at the stupidity of education....
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Don't blame me. I didn't vote for either of'em.
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