The Party Is Over

To The Editor:

I’d like to thank Karolyn Baumgarten for her letter of March 13 [Letter Hive, “The Value Of A Good School System”] as it perfectly illustrated the point I was trying make in my letter the previous week: Newtown’s teachers are completely out of touch.

She asks why teachers are always the ones getting “slammed.” The reason is the Board of Education gets the vast majority of the budgeted money and the biggest portion of that goes toward teachers’ salaries and benefits. And when the teachers are the only professionals on the planet demanding raises during the worst economic crisis in decades, well, Ms Baumgarten, it becomes an issue.

You say you can relate to others’ hardships because your husband’s wages were frozen. My husband and I had our salaries cut. We’re living on nearly a thousand dollars less per month than just a couple of months ago. But I suppose your situation is a hardship for you if you’re used to seeing a raise every year. Still, your defiant attitude toward a wage freeze of your own in baffling, given that your worst-case scenario is maintaining the status quo. I and many others wish we had it as good.

The tiresome refrain from many of you teachers is how hard you work and the 12-hour days you put in, etc. Well, that was in the job description and you signed up for it. As for my husband and I, when our employers cut our wages, they didn’t consider the impact it would have on our family or even how hard we worked for them. It was all about the bottom line.

If, as your letter implies, the quality of your teaching depends on you receiving a raise, then you’re in the wrong field. May I remind you that you work for the Newtown taxpayers and can’t expect to get more than we can pay. As for me, the money tree in the backyard is dead and the printing press in the basement is broken. I have nothing left to give you.

I’m sorry you could hardly face your students after reading my last letter. What I wonder, though, is how you can face yourself when your unreasonable demands are putting many of those same students’ families in financial peril.

I think it’s time for Newtown taxpayers to teach a little lesson to its educators, one that we in the private sector learned long ago: The party is over!

Allison Bloom

19 Greenbriar Lane, Newtown                                     March 18, 2009