Letter to My State Senator, Travis Holdman on Teachers

Public Education Matters

2.2.10

Letter to My State Senator, Travis Holdman on Teachers


The following is the "long" verson of a letter to the editor of my local paper. It was written by myself and a colleague following a "Third Party" town meeting held by Mr. Holdman in Bluffton, IN. It is in response to comments he made there about teachers. I hope you will read it. I would hope also that Mr. Holdman will read this version. It might help him better understand some of the people he "represents."

Dear Editor,

This letter is in response to Senator Holdman’s comments on teachers as reported on in the article “Holdman: Nothing’s Left” by Dave Schultz in Monday’s Bluffton News-Banner.

The article stated that since becoming a member of the State Senate, Holdman has been pressing for teachers to forego pay increases. He said that teachers get automatic pay raises “just for breathing.”

What Senator Holdman might be interested to know is that those pay increases are NOT “just for breathing.” They are also for eating, and for keeping a roof over our heads, and for putting gas in our cars, and for paying our taxes, among other things. They are called increments (teachers do not get cost of living increases) which are bargained into our contracts via a process that IS the legal process in Indiana for determining teacher salaries. The process is called “collective bargaining.” Also, Mr. Holdman might want to understand that the number of years (that each contract has increments) varies by district. For instance, the Adams Wells Special Services Cooperative’s increment steps only go up to 20 years not 25 as he indicated publicly.

We’d like Mr. Holdman to know that the reason we bargain these increments into our contracts is because the cost of living seems to go up every year. In fact, from what we can tell, each year, for at least the last 10 years, the cost of living index has risen by at least 3% in the state of Indiana. However, our increment increases don’t even begin to cover the cost of these living increases, let alone the rising cost of our insurance plans. So hopefully, Mr. Holdman might see that already teachers are GIVING and have been continually “coming to the table,” so to speak. We feel that for him to suggest that everyone else has given (as he did at the “Third House” meeting) and now it’s our turn is just plain wrong and very insulting. We’d like to point out to him and the public that we teachers have been giving all along.

In addition to our “sub-cost of living” increments, traditionally we have given in other ways. Mr. Holdman might want to ask any teacher he knows how much he or she and his or her colleagues voluntarily contribute to their students and their classrooms each year for basic supplies and items of need. Ask any one teacher that you know and we think you might find out that their amount of this type of giving is typically in the hundreds of dollars. We know many teachers who regularly exceed in spending what they can deduct from their income taxes for these contributions.

While we are at it, we might want to discuss what teachers in our area make in the first place. The AVERAGE teacher’s salary for our state is a little over 47,000 dollars. Mind you, this is an AVERAGE and since Indiana has a fairly “aging” teaching force this means that this average is not really reflective of what a beginning or young teacher makes. Also again, remember our “older” teachers do not even get these “increments for breathing” as Mr. Holdman likes to call them. We’d also like to point out that teachers are people with college degrees. All of us have bachelor’s degrees and a great many of us have master’s degrees which we pay for ourselves. Younger teachers are no longer required to get master’s degrees, however, they must continue to take continuing education classes at their own expense in order to keep their certification and to keep their jobs.

One might think that this level of education might be worth something to the taxpayers and to our legislators, but from Mr. Holdman’s statement “It’s time for the teachers to come to the table” it doesn’t appear that he values education or educators. It further appears that he doesn’t wish our tax payers to value them either. Why else would he make such an inflammatory statement in a public forum if not to try to influence the public? In addition to seeming to want to pit us against others in our community, he makes us sound like all we’ve ever done is “take, take, take” when all we and our unions are asking for is that we be paid a living wage. Mr. Holdman might be interested to know that the ISTA and our local bargaining teams are not even close asking for what the NEA is suggesting a beginning teacher salary should be (based on incomes of comparative careers and education levels) which is $40,000.

To continue our discussion of teacher incomes, the beginning salary for a teacher with a bachelor’s degree with our Cooperative is currently $30, 308 dollars. (The Cooperative’s salaries are close in range to other Wells and Adams districts.) That’s not at poverty level but we would not exactly say that’s rolling in dough either. For further reference, a teacher with 10 years of experience and a bachelor’s degree makes $35,188. The top salary with our Cooperative is a teacher with Master’s and 20 years of experience at $57, 508. Again this would be after working 20 years (or more) for a person who has both a Bachelor’s degree AND a Master’s degree. Really, think about it, does that seem right to you? Apparently Mr. Holdman is more than “okay” with it. He thinks we need to give back some more.

All of these figures need to be understood with the fact that our health insurance and our retirement plans and, of course, our taxes are taken out of these salaries. So to put this into better perspective, teachers at the very top end of our scale take home under $1400 dollars every two weeks if their pay is spread out through the entire year as most of us must do in order to survive. That’s less than $700 dollars every week. A teacher with 9 years of experience takes home less than a thousand dollars every two weeks, that’s $500 a week. If you figure this out to a 40 hour week, that’s $12.50 an hour. Again, this is not poverty level, but it is not exactly flush either. (It is true that teachers don’t work a 40 hour week all year long, however this example is to illustrate how much money we live on, and we’d like to point out that the way the school year is structured most of us can only pick up another couple thousand dollars a summer if we are not too busy taking classes to retain our jobs or can’t afford daycare for our children etc., and if we can find summer employment at all in this economy.)

Please read further for an even better perspective of what our salaries mean. The USDA guidelines for free and reduced lunches indicate that a beginning teacher’s (making our $30,308 with a household of 3 people) child would be eligible for a reduced cost on his or her school lunch. The children of a family of 5 people (say 2 adults and 3 children) would have eligibility for FREE lunches at a household income of $33,527.

This begs the question, does Mr. Holdman feel that a teaching income should only be a supplemental income? We happen to feel that teachers ought to be paid a livable wage in order to feed, house, and clothe ourselves and our families. Many of us are the single income for our households. We thank our lucky stars that we have a teachers union who helps us stand up to legislators like Mr. Holdman. We get the feeling that he would like us to pay to be able to teach and we respectfully decline his “kind offer” to come to the table. We feel we are already there and have been there for years. We also would like to be considered as something more than teachers. We also happen to be taxpayers ourselves. We also happen to be “spenders” who stimulate the economy when we buy our groceries and other goods and services.

We apologize to Mr. Holdman if our letter seems harsh, but he’ll have to forgive us our tone following his statements that seemed a total disregard for us as people and for our profession. We do feel that we do something more than take up oxygen. We happen to be very proud to be educators and feel that we have worked very hard to be the best that we can be. We also happen to believe that our field is one of great importance in our community and in our state and in our country and that it ought to be adequately compensated.

We realize that Indiana’s economy is in bad shape, but to ask that our teachers give back more than they already have given, sends a message that education is not a field that “the best and the brightest” would want to remain in or even consider in the first place. We sincerely think our field is strengthened by the caliber of people in it. When our future and our economy and our children’s futures depend on having solid teachers, we need “the best and brightest” in our schools, more than ever before. If we don’t continue to work to keep the salaries commensurate with other fields with similar educational levels and at a living wage level, then it seems not like an “invitation to the table” but an invitation to disaster for our state and our community in the years to come.

We’d like Mr. Holdman to take our message back to his colleagues. We and our colleagues heard what he had to say and we feel that it’s our turn to be heard by our state’s policymakers.

Sincerely,

Cindi Pastore
Tori Emrah