I hope you haven’t fallen under Frank’s spell with his long sentences with their mesmerizing clauses:
“The new school year has started. Teachers have checked their rosters for class size, their schedules to know what their day looks like, their mailboxes for notices and junk mail, there is mail for important information such as staff meeting times, their calendars for the first vacation day and the new salary schedule to see how much they will make this year.”
Zzzzzzzzzzz, Sorry I almost dozed off.
The simple fact is a school board has two options with its operational dollars. Hire more teachers and pay them less or hire fewer teachers and pay them more. That’s just about it. Frank has been the DFT president for thirty years and never once acknowledged this. It suits him to suggest that the Duluth School Board has unlimited money to satisfy all teachers and simply refuses to give them what they deserve. For Frank their can only be one explanation. The School Board is composed of teacher haters.
The simple fact is our teachers are paid a fair amount of money. Frank says the average teacher pay is $61,000. I don’t know how that compares with other teachers in Minnesota but I’ll bet it would sound pretty good to most Minnesota teacher – as an average.
There is one reason why the teachers salary has done well in the Dixon era. Keith Dixon didn’t want any more hassles than he already had pushing through the Red Plan so he bribed the teacher’s union into silence by offering quick and generous settlements dependent on drawing down the District’s one time ten percent reserve. I’ve commented on this before in my blog. Here is one example.