Yesterday 700+ teachers in one school district

[Lazie]

got their pink slips. Meanwhile in fantasy land teachers are striking for more money. Bruce need to realize he is going to be a one term PM, therefore, take the opportunity and deal wid matters. What dem gonna duh? Vote him out?

[Assasin]

same thing happening down here in the Atlanta region. I heard some teachers where crying and students demonstrating like crazy. Come this year in the next few weeks a lot of teachers going to get let go.

Ireland cut teachers pay by 20%. Spain cut it by 15% and Portugal cut it too. Many district in Georgia cut it by 2.5 % last year and the same this year. The only place I hear hiring is Miami. The stimulus money has ran dry so that put the teachers in a bad and states cutting budget.

[Lazie]

same thing happening down here in the Atlanta region. I heard some teachers where crying and students demonstrating like crazy. Come this year in the next few weeks a lot of teachers going to get let go.

Ireland cut teachers pay by 20%. Spain cut it by 15% and Portugal cut it too. Many district in Georgia cut it by 2.5 % last year and the same this year. The only place I hear hiring is Miami. The stimulus money has ran dry so that put the teachers in a bad and states cutting budget.

Just heard that one teacher committed suicide after getting her pink slip. A husband and wife, both teachers, each got their pink slip. Yet those who have dem job a Jamaica a mek up noise. No wonder ppl a trip ovah demself fi bring back Portia.

[Mosiah]

got their pink slips. Meanwhile in fantasy land teachers are striking for more money. Bruce need to realize he is going to be a one term PM, therefore, take the opportunity and deal wid matters. What dem gonna duh? Vote him out?

who made Bruce a one term PM?

[Mosiah]

were the US teachers owed money by their govt.?

[Lazie]

were the US teachers owed money by their govt.?

Well they're being ordered to renegotiate their contract, basically give back their increases. I guess in your busy efforts to express your hate for Bruce you may have missed that the gov't didn't say they're not paying the teachers, just offering to pay 1 bn instead of 2 bn this year.

[Assasin]

They had contract for raises and it has been slashed. Many counties force the teacher to take 2.5% or higher pay cut plus more furlow days without pay.

Not only that but if you get any unsatifactory rating in any area by the principal you gone which can be strictly political.

Trust me Mo it is not a good time for education for many states in the US. What the Jamaican teacher going through right now a luxury for them.

[Assasin]

Georgia slashes teacher bonuses

By James Salzer and Nancy Badertscher


The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
More than 2,000 of Georgia’s most highly certified teachers are getting hit with the biggest pay cuts in the profession this fall as the state trims spending.
U=13u904kra%2fN%3dbJuSIEwNiYw-%2fC%3d600695141.600711076.408689204.408291398%2fD %3dLREC%2fB%3d1755306765808978308%2fV%3d2[/IMG]
Related

• Cuts hit Fayette teachers hard

• 
  

Those educators are taking larger pay cuts than Georgia’s other 120,000 teachers because of the state’s decision to slash the 10 percent bonuses they have received for earning national board certification.
Many teachers who hold the certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards will likey see their pay drop a minimum of $3,000 to $4,000 this year. And for some, that’s on top of local salary cuts or furloughs.
“It’s devastating,” said Pam McCann, a Cobb County middle school teacher and a single mother of two who was first national board certified in 2002. “It’s an insult to think I would have to move somewhere else to be paid what I am worth.”
One Hall County couple who have both earned national board certification, Steven and Charity Wang, combined earn about $11,000 to $12,000 in bonuses per year. That will be cut almost in half.
“There may be a lot of very thin soup eaten at our house this year,” said Steven Wang, who teaches history, government and economics at North Hall High School.
The impact is being felt throughout the state, where teachers have for about a decade been receiving 10 percent bonuses for spending hundreds of hours putting together portfolios of classroom work, videotaping classroom lectures and passing national assessments to earn the certification.
The process costs $2,500, but the state has programs to help pay at least part of that cost. The certificate is good for 10 years and teachers who earn it can renew it. Teachers say they were promised the 10 percent bonus for the life of the certificate.
With the state slashing spending in every area of government, Gov. Sonny Perdue proposed eliminating the bonuses in his budget for fiscal 2010, which began July 1.
Lawmakers went about half way, agreeing to allocate $7.2 million. The Department of Education said the national board certified teachers will get just over half of what they’ve received in the past.
State officials say they had little choice but to cut the bonus program because of the massive drop in revenue they’ve seen during the recession.
“There was nothing in the budget that wasn’t cut,” said House Appropriations Chairman Ben Harbin (R-Evans), a supporter of the bonuses.
Some teachers and education officials say Perdue has tried to gut the bonuses for years because they were a pet project of his predecessor, Roy Barnes. That’s an accusation Perdue officials have denied.
Perdue has pushed for the state to move toward rewarding teachers based on the performance of students rather than on educators obtaining advanced training.
“This is a certification process that is not tied to any student achievement,” said Bert Brantley, the governor’s spokesman. “The governor realizes how difficult it is to get (the national certification). There is definitely a benefit you get from going through the process. But philosophically, do you reward achievement and performance (of students) or certification and training?”
Brantley said if money is available next year, Perdue will put it into programs that reward teachers based on student performance, rather than restoring the certification bonuses.
How much the certification helps students in the classroom has long been debated.
The National Research Council said in a report last year that students taught by board-certified teachers made greater gains on achievement tests than students taught by non-certified teachers. However, the report said it was unclear if the certification process itself leads to higher-quality teaching.
In Georgia, bonuses for teachers earning certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards began in the 1990s with the backing of Gov. Zell Miller. At the time, only a few state teachers and fewer than 100 nationally had earned the certification.
That figure is now nearly 74,000 nationally, including 15 percent of teachers in North Carolina and 13.7 percent in South Carolina. The percentage is still relatively small in Georgia, about 2 percent.
Many other states offer similar bonuses to certified teachers.
In Georgia, the cost of the program grew steadily as more and more teachers got the certification. By last year, the state was paying out about $13 million in bonuses to 2,100 board-certified teachers.
With this year’s budget troubles, some school districts have been slow to pass on even the smaller bonuses, fearing the state will not reimburse them next spring because of continued spending cuts.
For instance, the Cobb County school district sent out a letter last month telling board-certified teachers they will get a $1,000 local supplement at the end of December. However, they won’t get the state bonus until May, and that’s only if the Georgia Department of Education allocates the money.
Doug Goodwin, a spokesman for the system, said, “We can’t pass along funds that we don’t have.”
Hall County has spared its national board certified teachers a 2.4 percent salary cut that other teachers received. “The rationale was they had already been cut significantly by the state,” said Gordon Higgins, spokesman for Hall County Schools.
The state Department of Education has said it will come up with the money for the smaller state bonuses.
“I think it’s important that we live up to our commitment,” said State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox at a recent Board of Education meeting.
She said the certification “is likened — by people who are in the process and out of the process — to truly getting a Ph.D, a worthwhile Ph.D.”
To teachers like McCann, the cuts are troubling. She just bought a car, and her first paycheck was $400 lighter because her district instituted a 2 percent pay cut and she didn’t get the bonus money. For her, the total pay cut was 12 percent.
“I am definitely going to have to cut back and watch what I am spending,” McCann said.
After she found out she wasn’t getting the bonus, McCann contacted House Rules Chairman Earl Ehrhart (R-Powder Springs) about the cutbacks. Ehrhart is one of the most powerful lawmakers in the General Assembly, and he said the state made a pact with teachers that if they earned the certification, they’d get a 10 percent bonus.
“This is one we’re supposed to fund,” Ehrhart said. “I am going to do everything I can to make sure in the fiscal 2009 supplemental budget that the extra $5 million for the bonuses is in there.”
If the extra $5 million is added to the budget, the teachers would get the full 10 percent bonus.
To Tom Lewis, chairman of the English department at Whitewater High School in Fayette County and a longtime board-certified teacher, the issue is one of fairness.
“I do not argue that Georgia, and all states face horrendous economic problems,” Lewis said. “All teachers have already faced increases in benefits costs, years without cost-of-living raises ... cuts in other school services, etc.
“I fully expected a state salary cut, but to cut the supplement to a small group of teachers is picayune and discriminatory.”

[Assasin]

No Joke Mo.

eacher salaries are being cut across Georgia, but none more dramatically than in Fayette County, one of the state’s wealthiest counties with one of its finest public school systems. yld_mgr.place_ad_here("right_slot");
Enlarge photo

Vino Wong, vwong@ajc.com Joseph Jarrell, world history teacher at McIntosh High School, is among the Fayette County teachers facing a 6.1 percent reduction in salary this year. He is the head of the local chapter of the Professional Association of Georgia Educators.

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• Georgia slashes teacher bonuses

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With the three unpaid furlough days ordered this summer and an across-the-board pay cut imposed last February, Fayette County teachers — who already were among the lowest-paid in metro Atlanta — face a 6.1 percent salary reduction this year.
“We get kicked in the teeth twice,” Diane Basham, an economics teacher at the county’s McIntosh High School, said of the furloughs and 4.5 percent pay cut. “I fear what will happen next.”
Helping to stoke the anxiety: Employees recently were told that the insurance benefits they fought to keep last year could be back on the table, if the state orders more furloughs or deeper budget cuts late this year or early next year.
Employees thought the benefits cut was averted by the 4.5 percent pay cut, which starts coming out of their paychecks on Wednesday.
“A school district’s most valuable asset is not its buildings, its buses or its programs. It is its employees,” said Joseph Jarrell, a world history teacher at McIntosh High and the head of the local chapter of the Professional Association of Georgia Educators. “It appears that Fayette County has forgotten this.”
Some residents who were first attracted to Fayette largely because of the reputation of its schools are upset.
“There’s concern this is going to drive a lot of good teachers out of Fayette County, which has so long boasted how great our education system is,” said Cele Eifert, a mother of two and president of the McIntosh Parent- Teacher-and-Student Organization.
Fayette school Superintendent John DeCotis said the priority has been to preserve programs the community has come to expect — “a lot of extra things that other systems don’t have” and that cost more.
Among them: paraprofessionals in every kindergarten, first grade, arts and vocation class and the adoption every year of new textbooks, which some school systems are foregoing to save money, DeCotis said.
Will the cuts to teacher pay and other spending affect the school system’s performance? “We’ll see at the end of this year,” the superintendent said. “We’re running as fast as we can and working as hard as we can not to let it slip.”
Fayette schools — and its teachers — routinely receive state and national accolades for student achievement. For example, two of its schools — Starr’s Mill and McIntosh high schools — made this year’s “Top of the Class” list of the nation’s 1,500 best high schools published annually by Newsweek magazine.
The county’s average SAT score of 1,555 this year was 95 points above the state average, and 46 points over the national average. It’s also the only metro Atlanta school system able to boast that all its schools have made adequate yearly progress every year since the the Federal No Child Left Behind Act took effect.
Pain for teachers

Eifert, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, understands the economic realities. Her husband is one of the many Delta Air Lines pilots who live in Fayette County and who have taken sizable pay cuts to keep the airline flying.
Still, she’s adamant that Fayette teachers are underpaid for the important jobs they do and that their salaries should not have been touched.
“A lot of people in the community — even with the personal cuts that people have to deal with — think it’s a travesty that teachers have to go through this,” said Eifert, whose family moved to the county in 1998.
Cut the superintendent’s salary, travel and other expenses, she said.
“But don’t ever touch the teachers,” Eifert said. “It’s like in the military saying: ‘We’re going to cut the front line soldiers’ pay, but we still want you to have good morale and fight for us.’ ”
Jarrell said a benefits cut of the size last proposed would be equivalent to about a 3 percent pay reduction for teachers, pushing the total of all the cuts to 9 percent.
“Furthermore, if we receive additional furlough days, this could result in an additional 1.6 percent pay cut for teachers,” he said. “Teachers fear they face a total pay reduction that may reach 11 percent.”

[Karl]

Georgia slashes teacher bonuses

By James Salzer and Nancy Badertscher


The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
More than 2,000 of Georgia’s most highly certified teachers are getting hit with the biggest pay cuts in the profession this fall as the state trims spending.
U=13u904kra%2fN%3dbJuSIEwNiYw-%2fC%3d600695141.600711076.408689204.408291398%2fD %3dLREC%2fB%3d1755306765808978308%2fV%3d2[/IMG]
Related

• Cuts hit Fayette teachers hard

• 
  

Those educators are taking larger pay cuts than Georgia’s other 120,000 teachers because of the state’s decision to slash the 10 percent bonuses they have received for earning national board certification.
Many teachers who hold the certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards will likey see their pay drop a minimum of $3,000 to $4,000 this year. And for some, that’s on top of local salary cuts or furloughs.
“It’s devastating,” said Pam McCann, a Cobb County middle school teacher and a single mother of two who was first national board certified in 2002. “It’s an insult to think I would have to move somewhere else to be paid what I am worth.”
One Hall County couple who have both earned national board certification, Steven and Charity Wang, combined earn about $11,000 to $12,000 in bonuses per year. That will be cut almost in half.
“There may be a lot of very thin soup eaten at our house this year,” said Steven Wang, who teaches history, government and economics at North Hall High School.
The impact is being felt throughout the state, where teachers have for about a decade been receiving 10 percent bonuses for spending hundreds of hours putting together portfolios of classroom work, videotaping classroom lectures and passing national assessments to earn the certification.
The process costs $2,500, but the state has programs to help pay at least part of that cost. The certificate is good for 10 years and teachers who earn it can renew it. Teachers say they were promised the 10 percent bonus for the life of the certificate.
With the state slashing spending in every area of government, Gov. Sonny Perdue proposed eliminating the bonuses in his budget for fiscal 2010, which began July 1.
Lawmakers went about half way, agreeing to allocate $7.2 million. The Department of Education said the national board certified teachers will get just over half of what they’ve received in the past.
State officials say they had little choice but to cut the bonus program because of the massive drop in revenue they’ve seen during the recession.
“There was nothing in the budget that wasn’t cut,” said House Appropriations Chairman Ben Harbin (R-Evans), a supporter of the bonuses.
Some teachers and education officials say Perdue has tried to gut the bonuses for years because they were a pet project of his predecessor, Roy Barnes. That’s an accusation Perdue officials have denied.
Perdue has pushed for the state to move toward rewarding teachers based on the performance of students rather than on educators obtaining advanced training.
“This is a certification process that is not tied to any student achievement,” said Bert Brantley, the governor’s spokesman. “The governor realizes how difficult it is to get (the national certification). There is definitely a benefit you get from going through the process. But philosophically, do you reward achievement and performance (of students) or certification and training?”
Brantley said if money is available next year, Perdue will put it into programs that reward teachers based on student performance, rather than restoring the certification bonuses.
How much the certification helps students in the classroom has long been debated.
The National Research Council said in a report last year that students taught by board-certified teachers made greater gains on achievement tests than students taught by non-certified teachers. However, the report said it was unclear if the certification process itself leads to higher-quality teaching.
In Georgia, bonuses for teachers earning certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards began in the 1990s with the backing of Gov. Zell Miller. At the time, only a few state teachers and fewer than 100 nationally had earned the certification.
That figure is now nearly 74,000 nationally, including 15 percent of teachers in North Carolina and 13.7 percent in South Carolina. The percentage is still relatively small in Georgia, about 2 percent.
Many other states offer similar bonuses to certified teachers.
In Georgia, the cost of the program grew steadily as more and more teachers got the certification. By last year, the state was paying out about $13 million in bonuses to 2,100 board-certified teachers.
With this year’s budget troubles, some school districts have been slow to pass on even the smaller bonuses, fearing the state will not reimburse them next spring because of continued spending cuts.
For instance, the Cobb County school district sent out a letter last month telling board-certified teachers they will get a $1,000 local supplement at the end of December. However, they won’t get the state bonus until May, and that’s only if the Georgia Department of Education allocates the money.
Doug Goodwin, a spokesman for the system, said, “We can’t pass along funds that we don’t have.”
Hall County has spared its national board certified teachers a 2.4 percent salary cut that other teachers received. “The rationale was they had already been cut significantly by the state,” said Gordon Higgins, spokesman for Hall County Schools.
The state Department of Education has said it will come up with the money for the smaller state bonuses.
“I think it’s important that we live up to our commitment,” said State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox at a recent Board of Education meeting.
She said the certification “is likened — by people who are in the process and out of the process — to truly getting a Ph.D, a worthwhile Ph.D.”
To teachers like McCann, the cuts are troubling. She just bought a car, and her first paycheck was $400 lighter because her district instituted a 2 percent pay cut and she didn’t get the bonus money. For her, the total pay cut was 12 percent.
“I am definitely going to have to cut back and watch what I am spending,” McCann said.
After she found out she wasn’t getting the bonus, McCann contacted House Rules Chairman Earl Ehrhart (R-Powder Springs) about the cutbacks. Ehrhart is one of the most powerful lawmakers in the General Assembly, and he said the state made a pact with teachers that if they earned the certification, they’d get a 10 percent bonus.
“This is one we’re supposed to fund,” Ehrhart said. “I am going to do everything I can to make sure in the fiscal 2009 supplemental budget that the extra $5 million for the bonuses is in there.”
If the extra $5 million is added to the budget, the teachers would get the full 10 percent bonus.
To Tom Lewis, chairman of the English department at Whitewater High School in Fayette County and a longtime board-certified teacher, the issue is one of fairness.
“I do not argue that Georgia, and all states face horrendous economic problems,” Lewis said. “All teachers have already faced increases in benefits costs, years without cost-of-living raises ... cuts in other school services, etc.
“I fully expected a state salary cut, but to cut the supplement to a small group of teachers is picayune and discriminatory.”

What are the salaries in Georgia?
...and cost of living?

...and Jamaica?
...and that island's cost of living?

...comparision Georgia/Jamacia?
Just asking!

[Assasin]

definately not enough. teachers start somewhere about 32K to 42 K depending on district and get about 2-4% a year. Many had to take a pay cut last year of 2.5 and then another this year again.

[Mosiah]

anyway, i won't be distracted.

and you can run with my hatred of bruce all you want, i refuse to acknowledge a liar, hypocrite and criminal-lover as my prime minister.

[MissLondon]

and you can run with my hatred of bruce all you want, i refuse to acknowledge a liar, hypocrite and criminal-lover as my prime minister.

Again, did you feel the same way about ALL Jamaica's previous Prime Ministers? ( because most were what you described above)

[Mosiah]

look around for the answers. i doubt you'll be satisfied with them, but...