Districts Warn of Deeper Teacher Cuts

Source: New York Times

By TAMAR LEWIN and SAM DILLON
Published: April 20, 2010

School districts around the country, forced to resort to drastic money-saving measures, are warning hundreds of thousands of teachers that their jobs may be eliminated in June.

Districts in California have given pink slips to 22,000 teachers. Illinois authorities are predicting 17,000 job cuts in the public schools. And New York has warned nearly 15,000 teachers that their jobs could disappear in June.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan estimated that state budget cuts imperiled 100,000 to 300,000 public school jobs. In an interview on Monday, he said the nation was flirting with “education catastrophe,” and urged Congress to approve additional stimulus funds to save school jobs.
In the economic stimulus bill passed in February 2009, Congress appropriated about $100 billion in emergency education financing. States spent much of that in the current fiscal year, saving more than 342,000 school jobs, about 5.5 percent of all the positions in the nation’s 15,000 school systems, according to a study by the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/education/21teachers.html?hpw

Iraq
Afghanistan

and give it to the states to save those jobs

how little we value our children and their future.

we put them in so much debt that they, or even their children, can't repay!!!

them into this world stupid?

due to the contractual obligations the states have. California politics have defined and enlarged the problem. Middle class citizens successfully dictated that they got theirs and refuse to pay for others futures by locking down property tax increases.

It is my understanding that some state and local pensioners receive 95% of their last year's salary. Employees are allowed to cram OT hours into that last year to further inflate the pension. In many cases these pension terms were negotiated between unions and elected officials who were anxious to buy votes and didn't do due process on future impact of the agreements.

As a pensioner, who lives on 42% of the average of my last 5 years of service I find the terms overly generous. Those receiving or hoping to receive that higher amount may not agree. In any case the taxpayer must bear the burden.

Like overspent household budgets, states finding more going out then coming in must cut somewhere. Till their politicians grow a set and fix the hemorrhage of funds, children are an easy target.