One monthly School Board meeting down, 47 to go.
Actually its three meetings. One was a closed hour long meeting over teacher contract negotiations. Its been ten years since my last one. Mum’s the word of course but there has been a three month prologue that I can’t undo. I think I can say, reaffirm really, that none of the four elected candidates last November stressed that they wanted to spend any of the newly approved levy money to pay teachers more but they did pledge to hire more teachers.
The teachers are led by Frank Wanner who seems to have remained on the job like an ex president of a corporation for one more crack at negotiations as a CEO prior to full retirement. Frank’s era of labor leaders regarded higher salaries and benefits as the only goal worth going after. On that note I was quite satisfied with the story on the District’s projected budgets but dismayed by the headline.
The headline was not wrong: With budget surplus, Duluth School Board considers district’s financial future
The critical caveat showed up in the second paragraph: “But Bill Hanson, the district’s director of business services cautioned the School Board on Thursday, at its first budget meeting for the following year, that based on estimated revenue and expenditures, the district already will be at a deficit for the 2015-16 school year.”
In fact the projections for the end of my four year term on the Board showed a deficit projection of $9.6 million dollars. I won’t let that happen unless its over my dead body. I just have to hope the teacher’s negotiation team see the realities and do not try to disguise them from their membership. Among them:
A. The raises the teachers are calling for will make meaningful class reductions almost impossible.
B. The District’s last early settlement before waiting to see what the legislature would do caught us with our pants down since we failed to anticipate how chintzy the State legislature’s school funding would be. Most of the other districts in the state waited to see what St. Paul would do and got one year of zeroed out pay raises that Duluth missed out on.
C. There is a little matter of a legislature contemplating requiring Duluth taxpayers to bail out the teachers retirement plan at 15 million a year for God knows how long with annual tax increases that would be many times the size of the recently approved levies that skeptical voters barely passed. This legislation may not come to pass but if it did there would be Hell to pay.
No other current school board member has been through as many contract negotiations as me including one that nearly ended in a strike back in 1998. We will need ice water in our veins if we are to staunch our district’s bleeding and give our children the education they deserve.
