MEA Votes

School employees have given almost $1 billion over the past three years in salary and health insurance concessions. You pay hundreds – if not thousands – out of pocket every year for basic instruction supplies. You fund your continuing education and training to keep your skills sharp for your students. You work with increasing class sizes and decreasing resources. The vast majority of you pay into your retirement system and pay out of pocket for your health benefits.

Apparently, your bosses – or at least their statewide organizations – don’t care.

Yesterday, the “SOS: Save our Students, Schools, State” campaign, a group of school management organizations, released its reform agenda. While MEA agrees with their central premise that our school funding system is broken and needs to be overhauled, that’s where our agreement ends. SOS has apparently chosen to ignore the sacrifices made by its own employees by insisting that even more be taken out of your hides.

Their list of anti-employee proposals includes:

• A statewide health insurance pool (which has been proven to cost more money than it saves).
• Mandatory health premium payments (regardless of what you’ve already negotiated regarding your compensation).
• Increasing payments into the retirement system (not money that will go to fund your retirement, but rather to pay for the investment and funding mistakes made by bureaucrats in Lansing regarding your pension and retiree health funds).
• Banning health benefits for retirees before age 60 (despite pressure from the governor for employees to retire now in their early 50s).
• Changing bargaining law to take the pressure off of districts to settle fair, equitable contracts with their employees, including increasing penalties for strikes (exactly how many school employee strikes have there been in the past 15 years? I think I can count them on one hand).

Aside from these anti-employee attacks, it’s the omissions from SOS’s agenda that are most glaring.

• Why don’t they talk about ending the practice of “double-dipping” by administrators in the retirement system (“retiring” only to come back as a “consultant”…drawing a full pension and benefits plus their salaries)?
• Why ignore the high administrative costs in many districts, including superintendent salaries that rival and exceed the governor’s?
• Most of all, why are they not talking about the $1.7 billion sitting in school district rainy day funds across the state??? It’s raining! Pretty soon we’re going to need an ARK!

Again, the SOS campaign is a group of statewide school administrator organizations. That doesn’t mean your local administrators necessarily agree – or even know about – what SOS is advocating.

It’s time to ask them about it.

Talk with your superintendent, your principal, your business manager, your school board members and your PTSA president. See what they think about this attack on your school district employees by organizations that school district dollars support.

If they don’t agree with what their state organizations are up to, ask them to speak out. Here’s the list of SOS partner organizations, along with their phone numbers:

• Michigan Association of School Boards – (517) 327-5900
• Michigan Association of School Administrators – (517) 327-5910
• Michigan School Business Officials – (517) 327-5920
• Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals – (517) 327-5315
• Tri-County Alliance – (248) 209-2044
• Middle Cities Education Association – (517) 323-1079
• Michigan Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development – (517) 327-0779
• Michigan Negotiators Association – (248) 624-3317
• Michigan Elementary and Middle School Principals Association – (517) 694-8955
• Michigan Association of Administrators of Special Education – (616) 335-2411
• Michigan Association of Middle School Administrators – (734) 677-5678
• Michigan Parent, Teacher and Student Association – (734) 677-9500
• Michigan High School Athletic Association – (517) 332-5046