A Fair Contract Indeed!

I couldn’t believe my eyes! Teachers took 2%, 3.5%, and 2.9% raises over the next three years. But realizing that $10 per month toward a premium doesn’t cut it with today’s rising insurance costs, the insurance contribution is now $40, $80, and $100 over the next three years. Still much less than most of us pay, but a positive step in the right direction. The taxpayers will be thrilled! Now maybe the voters will go for that bond issue for new buildings when the tobacco settlement money comes through.

Kudo’s to Rootstowns’ school board and teachers for agreeing to a truly fair and equitable contract. Knowing that this August 85% of school levies failed across Ohio, they did the right thing by trying to cut the cost to the taxpayer. We cannot continue to pay for unsustainable perks and fringe benefits. This contract is something that I think is precedent setting in the state of Ohio.

The contract for Cuyahoga Falls was the best we could get and avoid a strike. While we will receive insurance premium payments in years two and three of our new contract the $120,000 in payments over the next three years doesn’t even begin to offset the added $1.4 million in liability due to an increase in the maximum claim on dental from $1500 to $2500. I personally would have liked to see a percentage put on insurance payments, so if the district sees another large increase like a few years back, everyone will absorb the cost. But although the raises are based on percentages, insurance will remain fixed and extremely low. No step increases in the insurance department either. And rather than an attendance bonus, I would have liked to seen a “didn’t use the insurance bonus” Oh wait- we have that too. The buyout program. But not many people use this option because our district is one of the last men standing that still offers FREE insurance. I’m sure at $10 per month we will still have very few buyouts, as you will not find cheaper insurance anywhere. In fact it has been my experience that the people that take the buyout have a spouse in the education field with the same lucrative benefits. In fact one teacher told me that he left the private sector making a higher salary because nowhere in the private sector could you get benefits totaling 50% of your salary AND summers off. I voted yes on this contract because I was promised that no new general fund levies would be needed for the next two years. The CEO would only promise two years because that’s the cycle of the state budget.

I want to give you an example of what an average teacher in Cuyahoga Falls makes. Please don’t get mad at me as I am just reporting the facts as I see them. I am using a teacher with 10 years experience, a BA+150 hrs. with a base salary of $50,758.

Base Salary $50,758
Medicare $736
Workers Comp $700
Retirement $7,106
Medical $10,676
Prescription $3,918
Dental $1,091
Life $110
Total actual cost of one Cuyahoga Falls average teacher $75,095

This is the amount paid by the taxpayer via the board for one year. This amount does not include the following perks:

First of all what is tenure worth? It most definitely is worth something. After all most of us aren’t guaranteed a job just because we kept our job. So this item does have a value. I’ll leave it to those smarter than me to come up with a dollar amount for this one. So what is the guarantee of knowing you’ll have a job with guaranteed percentage raises including step increases for not leaving your guaranteed job worth? My personal opinion is, knowing you have a job until you retire is almost priceless, worth at least $250,000 over a 30 year continuing contract.

Next up- summers off. This is also worth something. This dollar amount is a little easier to come up with. 15 weeks vacation. Yes, I’m counting Christmas and spring breaks. And I don’t want to hear about the things that need to be done on these breaks because we all have to do things and we don’t get that much time off to do it. Most of us with full time jobs and two weeks of vacation and the 10 common holidays off, work an average of 1,928 hours per year. A full time teacher works 1,314 hours per year. That’s a difference of 614 hours. Using our average teacher salary that means summers off are worth a whopping $23,712.68. WOW! Even more than I had suspected. But this is slightly unfair as it uses an hourly wage as its basis. So I’ll try to be fair and use the logic that ¼ of the year is a vacation (actually 15 weeks, I gave 3 weeks as 12 month worker time off) therefore ¼ of the total board paid amount is what summers are worth. That totals $18,773.

The attendance bonus is worth between $275 and $500. I would have liked to see this item taken out of the contract but it was not to be. Take heart in the fact that now a teacher can only miss three days now to qualify for it rather than the previous contracts eight days. Geez I need a bonus for going to work like I was hired to do. In my opinion this perk encourages people to come to work sick and spread it to our kids and other faculty and send it home to me. For a lousy five hundred bucks.

Let’s get a grand total so I can rest my weary wrists.
$75,095 Taxpayer funded salary and fringe amount.
$??? Tenure = continuing contract = job guarantee
$18,773 Value of summers off
$0 This average teacher missed too many days :o(

$93,868 Total teacher compensation…so far...

Add to this total, your tenure value, plus the value of accumulated sick leave buyouts, early retirement notification bonuses, and the many stipends and extra duty contracts offered.

My total, dividing all other perks with 30 years, is an average $104,000 per year on our current average teachers salary and fringes.