Teachers Share Recession’s Pain

Teachers were thought to be the last profession hit by recession. But now they will cutback their salaries too. Teaching is a noble profession but though! the govt. doesnt care about noble or unnoble. Wake up and look for a second source of income. Its good to keep a job these days but having a secondary source of income is a must.


Bankers, lawyers and journalists have taken pay cuts and gone without raises to stay employed in a tough economy. Now similar givebacks are spreading to education, an industry once deemed to be recession-proof.


All 95 teachers and five administrators in the Tuckahoe school district in Westchester County agreed to give $1,000 each to next year’s school budget to keep the area’s tax increase below 3 percent. In the Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow district, 80 percent of the 500 school employees — including teachers, clerks, custodians and bus drivers — have pledged more than $150,000 from their own pockets to help close a $300,000 budget gap.

And on Long Island, the 733 teachers in the William Floyd district in Mastic Beach decided to collectively give up $1 million in salary increases next year to help restore 19 teaching positions that were to be eliminated.

New York State’s powerful teachers’ unions have rarely agreed to reopen contract negotiations in bad economic times, let alone make concessions. But as many school districts presented flat budgets to voters in recent weeks, teachers in at least a dozen suburban areas have opened the door to compromise to save jobs, preserve programs and smaller class sizes, and show support for the towns and villages where many of them have taught generations of families.

Richard C. Iannuzzi, president of the New York State United Teachers, said the last time teachers made so many concessions was during the 1970s.

“In a normal school year, in a normal economic situation, we would see very little of what’s going on now,” he said.

In New York City, where the Bloomberg administration said last week that schools would face a 5 percent cut, the United Federation of Teachers said there had been no discussion of reopening its contract, which runs through October. And in New Jersey and much of Connecticut, where districts face similarly tight times, calls for teacher givebacks have largely been ignored, or rejected.

The teachers’ union in Ridgewood, N.J., voted this spring against a district proposal to renegotiate salaries. “We’re sympathetic to the economic situation, but we just don’t believe that teachers and school employees are overpaid,” said Steve Baker, a spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association. “Our members are the same middle-class people feeling the pinch of this recession as well, so we don’t feel it’s appropriate to target them for givebacks.”

Even in some of the places where unions have voted to help out management, some members have balked. In the William Floyd district, 60 teachers — about 8 percent of the total — voted against giving up what amounted to $1,190 apiece, while 580 teachers voted to do so (those who voted no still have to forgo the money). In Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, donations have been kept confidential.

“We didn’t want people to feel that it’s some kind of contest,” said Howard Smith, the Tarrytown superintendent.

Richard Perugini, a physical education teacher who is president of the Tarrytown teachers’ union, said he had pledged to give money even though his wife, Carmen, a teacher’s aide, is to be laid off from a nearby school district in June. “We’ll be living paycheck to paycheck,” he said.

Tarrytown’s budget for next year is $62.5 million, a 3.8 percent increase. That is about half the amount that budgets grew in recent years, leading the district to cut four teaching spots, four teaching assistants and 10 bus drivers and monitors. White Plains’s increase, by contrast, is 0.74 percent, to $185.7 million, the smallest in decades.

Yonkers, Westchester’s largest school system, has a planned budget increase of 0.81 percent (to $487.1 million), after increases of at least 5 percent in each of the past two years. District officials say they must buy fewer supplies, negotiate lower rates for food and busing, suspend supplemental teacher training and pare special education costs by more than $3 million to cover rising expenses for salaries and benefits.

“There’s a real sense that we’ve reached a limit, and in many communities, that translates into, ‘We can’t even raise it one dollar,’ ” Dr. Smith said.

In most districts, personnel costs are the largest expenses, so renegotiating terms with teachers is one of the only ways to avoid cuts in the classroom.

In Cambridge, N.Y., about 50 miles north of Albany, the 980-student district had proposed to lay off a teacher, two teaching assistants and five aides. Instead, the teachers agreed, in a vote of 68 to 22, to reopen their contract and accept smaller stipends for advising clubs, coaching teams and chaperoning events. Savings to the district: $67,868.

“I laid out the problem,” said Daniel Severson, the superintendent. “Everybody knows everybody because it’s small; we all live in the same town.”

William Floyd teachers averted the layoffs of nine teachers, and helped the 9,600-student district restore 10 other teaching positions, by agreeing to give up part of their raises.

“We did not want to see any of our teachers lose their jobs, or good programs suspended, and that’s what was going to happen,” said Karen D’Esposito, a high school social studies teacher who is president of the union.

In Tuckahoe, teachers already contribute $10 annually to a $1,000 scholarship awarded to a graduating student. But last fall, Michael V. Yazurlo, the superintendent of the 1,000-student district, approached the union about trying to keep next year’s property tax increase at 2.88 percent, the lowest in more than a decade.

The teachers’ union had initially proposed that its members voluntarily contribute between $200 and $600, based on salary, to support the school budget. But that amount was rejected — as too little — by many teachers. The final amount was $1,000 per teacher.

Marianne Amato, a 12th-grade English teacher and president of the teachers’ union, said, “Everybody really understood that this is a different time and we have to do something to help as a community of teachers.”