The following is a copy of the speech given by SEA Communications Director
Mr. Fred Dillon to the Strongsville Community Rally in support of its teachers.
To start the school year, the Strongsville Board of Education’s Treasurer gave a presentation on the state of the district. He started with a video of a toilet flushing. Unable to conceal a smirk, he asked, “Any questions?”
You bet we have questions.
“Why is the state of the Strongsville schools a joke to the Treasurer?”
“Why is your child in a class of 34 students?”
“Why does your child’s classroom have holes in the ceilings?”
“Why doesn’t your child have access to the latest educational technology or,
for that matter, virtually any educational technology?”
“Why have 55 teaching positions been eliminated over the past two years?
How is this helping your child succeed?”
“Why was your child’s teacher given a lay-off notice to start the school year?”
“Why has the Board taken hundreds of thousands of dollars away from your child
in the last year alone to pay an attorney for drawn-out negotiations?”
The answer to these questions is in the Treasurer’s video: your child’s education is being flushed down the toilet by the policies of the Strongsville Board of Education.
Mr. Treasurer, this isn’t a joke. Our children’s education is at stake.
Our teachers have been challenged by unfunded legislative mandates, less man power, larger class sizes, and shoddy negotiating ploys, and the district wants to heap on more challenges.
Despite these challenges, the children of this district, your children, have received an excellent education due to the efforts of teachers. Over the past five years, the teachers of Strongsville have continually made sacrifices and done without the basic necessities in the classroom by working harder and harder each year. We’ve done this while maintaining the excellence that this community expects, the excellence that this community deserves. And we are not going to stop now!
Yes, we have been working without a contract. Yes, we taken multiple base pay freezes over the past 5 years. Yes, we have made concessions in our health care, saving the district a half a million dollars. Yes, we have ALL been given letters for lay-off.
However, the community can have faith we will not stop doing the heavy lifting to make sure your child’s education remains excellent.
In addition to our contracted duties ... We give countless hours of tutoring. We run outside of school activities. We reach out to parents beyond the scheduled school day. We write letters to colleges and employers. We buy classroom materials out of our own pockets - even basics like chalk, wall clocks, and marking pens.
Yet the Board does not think that is enough.
We have remained silent while doing more and more with less and less. It has now reached a critical point where district policies will negatively effect your child’s future.
After making major health care concessions and agreeing to a base pay freeze just a year ago, we want nothing more than another continued freeze this year.
Your Board apparently thinks that it is a better idea to throw money away.
Among the Board’s poor choices has been to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to a lawyer for drawn out negotiations. In the 18-month period from December 2008 through May 2010, the Board paid over $420,000 of your tax dollars to their lawyer, over $300,000 on negotiations alone. Everyone but the Board can see that they are wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Your Board sees fit to give an elementary principal a $3000 bonus while begging the community for donations so the Marching Band can attend away games.
Your Board has received paid registrations for conferences, including hotel rooms and meals, while considering cutting the outdoor education program for your children. Their solution – blame cuts on the teachers and then ask parents to get the funding on their own.
Your Board pays a Treasurer over $100,000 a year, but the superintendent deems it ludicrous that the Treasurer should be expected to have a yearly budget in place so staffing decisions could be made in a timely fashion.
When will this insanity end? Think of what these hundreds of thousands of dollars could buy in opportunities for your children.
Decent technology? While other schools have Smart Boards and Video Projectors furnished in every classroom, your teachers beg for a pittance of chalk and overhead projector markers. As other schools dive head first into the best of cutting edge 21st century technologies, we continue to repair our fleet of broken down antiques. While our students fall farther and farther behind, our Board thought it prudent to give their Treasurer a 24% raise from 2007 to 2008.
Maybe we could spend all the flushed money from the Board’s poor choices on the structural integrity of our buildings. At the high school, we knew we were back to school when we saw the buckets strategically placed all around the building to catch the water leaking through the holes in the ceilings. Elementary buildings are falling apart after years of neglect. Why can’t our Board spend money on the basic upkeep of the district instead of paying the retire/rehire superintendent a salary double that of the average teacher - while he receives a full pension?
Maybe the wasted money could be used in place of charging students to play sports or even to attend school. Of course, then we would have to stop paying an attorney $250 per hour for negotiations.
Besides these poor choices, the Board and their representative show no respect for the well-being of the community or the hard work of the teachers. The Treasurer showed this disrespect when he ended his talk with a cartoon stating, “I want to thank you for your utter apathy.”
We say to the Board: The teachers of this district aren’t apathetic. We have taken pay freezes and health care cuts so that YOU could work out your financial problems. We have paid for thousands of dollars in basic classroom supplies so that YOU don’t have to. We have put in countless hours after school, on weekends, and in the summer, so that YOU can continue to tout our district as an excellent one nine years in a row.
And the parents of this community aren’t apathetic either. Our parents and our community want what is best for the children of Strongsville. Parents recognize that a child in a class of 34 is not receiving the same quality of education as a child in a class of 24. Parents understand that a teacher who has a planning period to provide thoughtful, written feedback, plan creative lessons, create new materials, and most importantly, meet individually with a student will be a better teacher for their child than one who can’t. And parents also know that to attract and keep good teachers in their children’s classrooms, the district needs to offer those teachers a fair and equitable contract.
Though the Board’s representative made a joke of the financial crisis in our district, no one is laughing. We have tried to help stop this crisis by giving the Board savings of over a half million dollars on the concessions we made just last year. We have given time, dedication, and commitment to your children. We have given until we can give nothing more. Now we ask you to tell the Board that your child’s education is not a joke. Please insist that the Board meet with the teachers at the table to end these drawn out negotiations with a fair and equitable contract.
Thank you for support and for joining us today.
