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Last night the Board of Supervisors had a chance to give our teachers a pay raise. They failed. By a 5-4 vote, they approved a tax rate of $1.14, which provides the same number of dollars per student as the previous year's budget but falls $10 Million short of a pay raise for school employees. Adding insult to injury, the Supervisors at the same time voted a pay raise for County employees.
Please take a moment to thank Sugarland's Susan Buckley for standing strong for schools and teachers last night. She stood alone. I am particularly disappointed that Leesburg's Kelly Burk switched her vote after initially voting for the pay raise. I am further disappointed by Andrea McGimsey, who just last week joined Kelly Burk in voting for a tax rate a penny higher that would have funded teacher pay raises.
The fight is not over yet. The final budget vote is in five days.
Please write to Supervisors Andrea McGimsey and Kelly Burk and ask them to add a Penny for a Pay Raise next Tuesday when the final vote comes.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Penny for a Pay Raise: 5 Days left
Posted by John Stevens at 6:55 AM
Labels: Board of Supervisors, Budget
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15 Comments:
Even if Supervisors Buckley, McGimsey, Burk and Kurtz all vote in favor of 1.152, wouldn't the Board still need one more vote? We need a working majority of 5 to pass a rate that includes a reasonable raise for our teachers.
Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of $1.152 or even 1.16, but if the votes aren't there, it's difficult to blame Supervisors who voted for a pay-raise rate first before supporting 1.14.
I think pressure should be brought to bear on Supervisor Burton. It is his constituents in western Loudoun who will suffer the biggest rates of overcrowding with the lower rate.
I don't think there is the slightest chance to get it higher. There is a big out cry that the rate should be 1.10. I do agree with the raises to the county employees, it should be across the the board raise or no raise. No raise for anyone. I am self employed and I am taking a big pay cut these years and with this rate my taxes will go up about 1,700 hundred dollars with this rate.
Yes, Buckley McGimsey & Burk make three. Yes, we need five. But if even one Supervisor drops from the $1.14 roll call, there is no majority at any level and that gives us opportunity to fight with reason. I think that the five democrats can be strong together in support of public education when they have the facts and the people behind them. Burton doesn't believe we'll need to freeze salaries so I don't think he's even an option. It's up to the Democrats to stand together.
I'm not sure where the "1.10 outcry" is coming from. There are certainly people who have sent a lot of emails, and Supervisors Waters and York have claimed there's a lot of pressure, but the screams of a minority who oppose any and all taxes can sometimes sound like a majority, and I think that's what's going on.
$1.15 or even 1.16 won't hurt the vast majority of residents who live in relatively modest homes throughout the county, and it will at least maintain the current levels of service in our schools, police stations and firehouses.
No one wants to pay higher taxes until it takes the fire truck an extra 5 minutes to get to their house, and in those 5 minutes, the house burns down. The difference between $1.10 and $1.14 or $1.15 is felt in the response times of public safety, the dropout rates of our students and the quality of our environment.
John, doesn't the School Board set salaries? I'm not doubting that one way to handle a lower budget allocation from the Supervisors is to freeze salaries, but isn't that a School Board, not a Supervisors, decision?
By your very own logic, in the comment, shouldn't pressure be brought to bear on Supervisors' Kurtz and Miller rather than McGimsey and Burk? Shouldn't we be seeking to expand the voting majority for $1.15 instead of attacking those who tried to pass it at all?
Standing on principle is a wonderful thing, but our Supervisors were elected to govern, and that means proposing and passing rates at one level when the votes are not there for another. Politics is never getting what you want, but getting closer and closer to what you want every time.
Not passing the $1.14 rate means that the Supervisors may have been put in the realm of "continuing resolutions" which fund everything at 2007 levels, while the debate dragged on for another three months. The Republicans on the Board would have loved that, as it would have slashed the budget and painted the Democrats as incapable of governing. Even worse, it would have left the Schools with even less money than the rate that passed last night.
Yes, $1.14 is far from optimal, but it is even farther from terrible.
To suggest that the Supervisors can set the budget level at whatever rate they want and then expect the School Board to be able to set salaries at whatever level it wants simply doesn't add up. We have fixed expenses like electricity for buildings, fuel for buses, liability insurance, paper, books, cleaning supplies, textbooks, maintenance parts, pens, balls, uniforms and everything else we buy. But most of all we have people. 86% of our budget is in people. 92.8% of those people are school-based. Simply put, there isn't much room in the 14% to give a pay raise to the 86%, especially when the 14% is subject to the same inflation that impacts your family and mine. To give you clear numbers though, our total budget under the $1.14 tax rate is $744,439,000. Of that, 14% is $104,221,000 (the amount not spent on people). To provide the step increase that we are seeking it will take an additional $10,000,000 (which would still require $39,800,000 in difficult cuts to our proposed budget). To provide a salary increase without the Penny for a Pay raise would therefore mean a 10% reduction in non-personnel spending overall before accounting for inflation, which raises the reduction even higher. Given that most of our expenses are not optional (do we provide 10% fewer buses?), the few areas that could be cut would need to be obliterated.
We have the most effective, most cost-efficient school district in the DC area and cuts do not come without consequences. The Supervisors cannot disown their decisions by suggesting that their vote does not make them responsible for those consequences when it comes to schools.
As for county employees, their very own document from Tuesday night shows a 3% increase in county employee salaries at the $1.14 tax rate. If I am mistaken about that then I will need to see a more recent document than I have been provided.
The School Board will need to make difficult decisions no matter what, and we are well up to the task. Class sizes will increase, programs will be cut, positions will be lost and fees will be charged. My aspiration is that as we ask teachers to do more with less we give them the modest pay increase that they expect.
Lee J is right, there is no public outcry for school employees, or county employees for that matter, to get a raise. The citizens of Loudoun County are sick and tired of paying higher taxes, we are all in the same boat.
School employees are going to have to suck it up like the rest of us during this economic downturn. My suggestion for the teachers is to get a part-time job during the 10 weeks they get off in the summer. If my family can do it with 2 full time jobs, so can theirs. I have kids, I pay taxes, I love the schools and I think teachers are the best, but let's be reasonable. It is not reasonable to be demanding a raise when there is NO MONEY in the county coffers to do so.
If people are mad on both sides of this rate, it's probably the right rate.
My wife taught in the Public Santa Monica Schools at grade school level in a school they called SMASH.
The building was very old at the time long past it's time. Yet several movie stars sent their kids there as wealthy parents and there was less fortunate kids. Everyone pitched in to give the best education possible to every child not just about the money, because there wasn't enough. They had to do serious fund raising to even have enough books at times or even a gym teacher for a day or two a week. My wife was in charge of fund raising for several years and had to raise as much as 55,000 dollars to help supplement the school. And the turned it into real fun kinds of fund raising. These kinds of things need to be done here. She could go on volumes about this school and how they raised money and made the education absolutely superb. The school was like a family the rich helping the poor but you have to make the school and the students and parents get really involved not easy but extremely important. It is about how much people get involved not always the money. My two kids also went there and probably the best teaching and total environment they were ever in. There wasn't always the money there, but they made it work and never did I see the school system do what I see happen here every year how the poor kids are going to suffer if we don't get the money and try to get the parents to parade all this around. This grade school at the time was not as large as the elementary schools until they finally absolutely had to build a new one.
The point is Loudoun schools can still give the children a great education with less money. Certainly the wealthy city of Santa Monica could back 9 or 10 years ago when my kids went to school there.
My wife just told me it was $65,000 in fund raising for a 180 student public school K thru 8 at that time over ten years ago. It was a small public school in a fairly big city because the Santa Monica school system used this school to try out different things to see if they could be implemented into the much larger schools. But they did not get any extra money per student from the other schools in the system
My point is they raised about $360 per student. Now if you could do anything like that in Loudoun's 57,000 student system that would be an additional over 20 million.
That is the kind of innovative thinking that needs to go into these hard economic times for many in this county. Of course in a school system this large you totally depend on this but it could help to be used to help pay for the extras this school system might need such as white boards or whatever. I am sure you do some of this now but perhaps it could be enlarged and the people that can afford it more it is a way for them to contribute directly in support of the school system. Have some school wide contest to see how the students would come up with ways to raise more for the schools. I bet you might find the kinds very innovative and come up with workable fund raising ideas have have fun doing it. And I sure there are a million other ideas.
I believe the days of the endless trough is over from the tax payers no matter how much they want to help when they can't afford it.
Lee J. While I commend your wife for her efforts, I must say that I don't feel that I was hired by LCPS to raise money. I was hired to teach. As a veteran teacher (here and in another state), I can look myself in the mirror every morning and say that I have given 100% of my daytime energies to teaching children to the best of my abilities. My husband, a retired college professor, put his heart and soul into teaching, but neither of us ever felt it was our duty to raise money. So, while I'm sure the school to which you refer was a wonderful and energetic place, I suppose I would prefer a school where children got an extra hour of instruction to an hour of knocking on neighbors' doors asking them to buy something. I'm truly not meaning this in a snarky way, I just think that we all have talents and that society makes the best use of those talents by making it possible for us to use them in an optimal setting.
anonymous above See it was not the door to door funding raising. That is why we need more innovative thinking.
It did not involve many of the teachers just the few like my wife that wanted to do it because our two kids went to school there.
She would do two silent auctions that involved the kids and parents and area businesses and not just businesses in the city but outside it also. The auctions themselves were not just for the parents involved but anyone could attend thru free advertising by newspapers etc. They actually become a community event far beyond the school boundaries. With entertainment put on by the kids and parents etc even Amber Tamblyn who was in one of my kids classes and later became a star in the TV show Joan of Arcadia participated.
AS well as other kids that became well known. So these shows produced some stars ha ha ha ha
Anyway my point is there a many fun ways to raise money without going door to door. My wife just came in here and told me about all there extremely fun raising projects most very simple and too numerous to go on here. She said she could go into depth on how all this was done and it mainly involved parents and kids. As she was telling me all the simple things they did it almost reminded me of marketing how draw draw money in anyway you can like professional sports or the movies do. She said it sounds more complicated then it sounds once you got it all rolling. And it makes it fun for the kids and parents. Things like selling calenders with your kids in them at Christmas. Arts and crafts and science fairs were used to make money and on and on and on The local bagel shop donated bagels everyday that the parents bought with coffee when they dropped their kids off. Like I said way too numerous to mention and once they had all these things organized they were not too hard to keep going. Personally I don't know how much Loudoun is doing like this. Why not commercialize the school system by having businesses pay for advertising and sponsorship more like professional sports and the movie industry. Look for so called profit centers anyplace you can. Get the kids involved so they can learn business and advertising and showmanship and for the good of the school financially.
Anyway I think we are missing many innovative ways to raise money for the schools then just going to the board every year looking for these huge increases.
To the anonymous teacher, I agree on the instruction time vs. selling junk door to door, but I think Lee was talking about the PTA raising this money, or am I wrong? PTA's raise all kinds of money so they do what they have to do, you can participate or not. A fundraiser is just that, it might not necessarily mean knocking on doors.
We pay plenty in taxes, the per pupil costs are very high, there is room in this bloated budget to get things done without having to pay for things via fundraisers from our pocketbooks. I think the better solution is to look line by line through the current school budget, and take out excessive items, like the much touted and maligned INTERACTIVE WHITE BOARDS. This is one of probably dozens of examples. This was not done. The Board whimped out, Hatrick won this round and will continue to do so until the BOS gets their act together.
As for "we all have talents," that is very true. However, in the real world we are all asked to step outside our talents and comfort zones to go the extra mile and I don't know why teachers should not be asked the same. Parents and teachers both put a lot of time and effort into the education of (their) children. I don't believe anybody is successful without being flexible and willing to step it up occassionally - people in private industry and other civil servants such as Police Officers do it all the time. It is called being a member of the community, not just working a job.
Yes you are correct it was the an extremely active PTA mostly on the parents side. They even had two yard sales at the school where all the parents brought there stuff and was sold to raise money. Like I said the list goes on and on
I will say they found the door to door stuff was extremely time consuming and produced very little money in comparison to the other more fun kind and parent child community interactive things.
People would donate their vacation home for a weekend to raise money at the auctions. Like I said the list is endless. Think out of the box.
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