PERS are the Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite!

All right. Sir-Blog-A-Lot is back. Just choppin' at the bit to update y'all.

So I read this article in The (nationally reknowned) Oregonian and it's been bothering me. I tried to complain about it to Marsha, but her eyes started to glaze over. So I told her I would just have to blog about it because THEY always listen to me and THEY want to know about how retirement benefits effect Oregon school funding.

Anway, I guess right now Oregon spends a little under the national average per student, slightly above the national average for salaries (around $40,000), and double the national average on P.E.R.S. Now, to be honest, I don't exactly understand the notorious P.E.R.S. because they have to do with retirement benefits and, like insurance, this middle school math teacher somehow can't get his head around them. But, the key idea, is that a certain group of teachers are getting incredible retirement benefits, while our students are entering ever-more crowded classrooms.

To my knowledge (and I'm getting a little over my head in terms of expertise so look for the big picture ideas), what happened was during the stock market explosion, instead of raising salaries, teachers could be guaranteed the ridiculously high going rates on their P.E.R.S. The teacher's union jumped at the deal, and then, subsequently, the stock market dropped and now the government is having to make up the difference. This has now been eliminated, but until the teachers who got that deal die, Oregon tax payers will be footing the bill.

I can see why people would be pissed off about this, but I'm a little annoyed at how the finger seems to be pointing towards the teachers. Adorning the article was a picture of a teacher drinking a Margarita on a beach. Maybe I'm being a little sensitive, but I felt like the implication was, "How ironic that you guys complain about school funding when it's you who are bankrupting the system."

I mean, not that teachers expect to be paid a lot, but they're not saints. Were they supposed to turn down a good deal? Are they supposed to go into negotiations and talk down the offers? Unions are always in the position that the more they get, the less the business gets. But with teachers, the business is, in a way, the students. So we get a raise and the students lose art.

Or does it have to be looked at that way? I wish we could see teacher's salaries as a separate issues. I know they are logically connected, but the state also fund roads, jails, firemen... You don't hear people linking the repaving of I-5 with dropping a reading program. So when the state screws up and overpays teacher, maybe who is effected is future teachers, but not the students we teach- who had nothing to do with it.

The fact of the matter is Oregon schools still have funding issues. We've gone from being one of the country's higher funders to below average, meaning huge cuts in how schools were run. Even worse, is that funding has been inconsistent. I've only taught for 5 years, but during that time, every year funding was an issue. We've gone from cuts to gains to cuts. This has caused us to start programs, lose them, and then get the chance to get them back (but who knows if we should take the risk). It's not as if we as a state are ignorant to the fact that each year we'll need to pay for schools.

To sum-up - We need stable adequate funding. And just because your high school English teacher is sipping margaritias on the beach doesn't mean my classes should be between 30-34 students.