Teachers’ Pay Raise

* Re “District Offers Conejo Teachers 10% Pay Hike,” Oct. 13.

Riddle: When does 8.12% equal 10.24%?

Answer: When a newspaper reporter cut freshman math class on the day the teacher taught how to compute averages.

Let’s use a word problem to review. Let’s say a teacher makes $100 a month, and his or her salary is increased by 6% the first semester. That means he or she gets $106 a month for half a year. Then the teacher receives another 4% increase for the second semester. That would mean that she receives $110.24 per month for the second half of the year. To find out how much the teacher makes over a period of one year, you must add $106 plus $110.24, which equals $216.24, and divide by two. The average monthly salary for the entire year is $108.12--an increase of 8.12%.

Because our new contract is exactly this--6% for the first semester and 4% for the second--this article’s headline should have read “Conejo Teachers Receive 8.12% Raise.”

Not only is a math lesson appropriate here but a little history wouldn’t hurt either.

This summer, the Conejo Valley Unified School District received a special onetime allotment of $11 million from the state with a rare “no-strings-attached” clause and a strong recommendation to give as much as an 11% salary increase to teachers.

The governor and other state officials said this windfall was intended to lure new talent into teaching and to encourage veteran teachers to stay in the profession. This money was clearly intended to help prevent an impending teacher shortage that experts say could be the scourge of the first decade of the 21st century.

Because the Conejo district spent $6 million of the state funds before our teachers’ union was made aware of it, at the very least, the district and school board exercised poor judgment. It means that when we teachers voted to accept the offer of 8.12%, we really didn’t have a choice. We were being held in a stranglehold by a district that said, “We’d really like to give you more but we already spent it.”

What kind of answer is that? What do you think a judge would say to a deadbeat dad who pleaded, “Your Honor, as much as I’d like to pay my child support, I can’t because I spent it”?

The difference is that our union told us that if we voted to reject the 8.12% offer in favor of impasse, the board would continue its spending spree with the remaining $5 million and, after months of arbitration, we would most likely end up with considerably less than 8.12%, even nothing.

Ironically, the deadbeat dad story would end on a happier note than the teachers’ story because the judge would order him to stop spending money immediately until the decision were rendered.

Signed by 50 teachers

of the Conejo Valley

Unified School District