Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Florida teachers

Many Florida teachers have not had any raises in three years, even though they had contracts with the state for raises for the last two. And that includes they have not gotten any steps for years of service, so a teacher that has been teaching for five years is still making the wage for two years of seniority.

The current governor cut the state school budget twice (which was already the lowest in amount of money spent per student in the entire country). He also rescinded the state constitutional amendment the required that no more than 25 students per teacher, so the schools cut staffing to be able to meet the new lower budgets. Still not sure how the governor was allowed to violate the state's constitution?

Plus he gave huge property tax breaks to people buying new homes that cost more then their previous home!!! This hurts both the school districts people are moving out of because they lose the tax base, and the districts they move into because they do not receive the normal amount of tax base per new student they are use to.

And obviously the only people that were buying BIGGER houses were the ones that had money and have not been hurt by the economy, so why give them a big break?

Now they are trying to throw out tenor with the excuse that there are bad teachers they cannot get rid of. Which is totally false, if a teacher is bad they have no problem getting rid of them. What they are really doing is trying to get rid of teachers at the higher end of the pay scale so they can hire in new teachers at lower wages.

Starting wage for a teacher in Florida is $33K, and people think not bad for 9 months out of the year and only working 7 hours a day.. But the facts: 1, they work 10 months a year in Florida. 2, average teacher day with at school is more like 9 hours, with another 2 hours a day at home doing school work. All this with no overtime or extra pay. You think the kids have a lot of homework, you should be a teacher. So that is 11 hours a day for 45 weeks. That is not counting holiday weeks, or the fact that some do grading and such during the weeks of Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Spring Break when they are off. So it adds up to 2475 hours a year average. That is $13 per hour. Workers at Costco start at $11 per hour, and they didn't have to go $40k in debt to get a degree.

If you work a regular 40 hour a week job you work 2080 hours a year. Minus the paid holidays and vacations which can vary. For someone having worked many years in the same job and get 5 weeks vacation a year, (teacher don't get extra vacation as they have the four weeks of summer off), they work 1800 hours a year for thier pay.

Doesn't really seem fair to me.

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