This doesn't mean I don't like you

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By Barb Ickes | Monday, January 21, 2008 2:15 PM CST | () comments

To some, I’m wasting my breath when I say I have nothing against school teachers and, in fact, sincerely admire most of them.

Some won’t believe me. They’ll wonder how I can pick on a group I admire.

But the fact of the matter is that public school teachers are similar in an important way to cops and firefighters. They work at jobs that are paid entirely by taxpayers. Because of that, we are not only entitled to scrutinize, we’re obligated.

I took a look at the initial contract proposal submitted last month to the Davenport School District by the Davenport Education Association, which is the teachers union. I also looked at the current contract and spoke to the union president.

In the recent past, I’ve taken the unpopular position that some teachers are sufficiently compensated. I’ve argued against across-the-board pay raises for teachers. But I have never suggested that they are overpaid.

I will suggest now, however, that they have an even better deal going than I previously recognized.

For instance, did you know that teachers are required by contract to work 185 days a year? No big deal, right? We knew it was a considerably shorter year than what most of us work. But the days are shorter, too. The Davenport teacher contract states that elementary teachers are to teach for 270 minutes a day, or

4.5 hours. Anything past that and the teacher “shall receive additional compensation.”

But that’s just for teaching. They are required to be at school for 7 hours and 40 minutes. Bettendorf, Pleasant Valley and North Scott teachers have to be on campus for eight hours a day.

It also came as a surprise to me that new Davenport teachers start out with 10 sick days a year and get another day for each year, up to 15 days. In other words, any teacher with as much as five years’ experience gets 15 days of sick time per year.

That’s three more weeks they have coming. And if they don’t use the sick days, they get to bank them. If a teacher in Davenport worked for 12 years without using a sick day, that teacher would have 180 days in the bank.

In other words, that teacher would have almost an entire school year (minus five days) of sick time coming. The average yearly salary for a Davenport teacher is $48,059.

In the new contract, teachers are asking for fewer hours of parent/teacher conference time. They want to work a maximum of 11 hours over Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of conference week, even though those days count as student attendance days. They get Thursday and Friday off.

Also new in the proposed contract, Davenport teachers are asking for free memberships to the YMCA. Let’s pretend that the district gets 50 percent off the regular yearly membership fees, and every teacher joins as an individual, rather than the more expensive family membership. With 1,234 teachers at $219 a year, the benefit would cost taxpayers $270,246. That’s roughly the cost of five teachers’ annual pay.

When asked about the YMCA proposal, union president Jodi Tupper (who is married to a school board member) said the school district is in a partnership with the Scott County Family Y, yet the only break district teachers are getting is a waiver of the enrollment fee.

I wondered why the union figures teachers have a free membership coming just because the district and the Y are partners. I mean, the taxpayers put up the money for the partnership, right?

Tupper said, “Because it would be nice.”

Well, yes it would.

I also asked her how the union arrived at this peculiar request: “Classroom temperatures shall be no lower than 68 degrees.”

Tupper explained that some classrooms are so cold that teachers have to wear coats and gloves to get through the day. So I asked whether these teachers put on the gloves and coats at 67 degrees.

“I can’t talk about that,” she said. “We’re in the negotiation process right now.”

OK. What about the contract section that says teachers get two years of experience credit for serving in the Peace Corps? I asked whether the nature of the work teachers did in the Peace Corps is taken into consideration. If you spent two years digging ditches, for instance, does that count as teaching experience that the Davenport School District should consider when setting your salary?

“That part of the contract is cleanup language,” Tupper answered.

Well, it is a union. And union leaders are obligated to try for the best possible contract for their members.

Just like we’re obligated to pay for it.

Barb Ickes can be contacted at (563) 383-2316 or bickes@qctimes.com. Comment on this column at qctimes.com.