It’s an O. Henry story about an Illinois school bureaucrat who created a lucrative position in the district and had it bestowed upon . . . himself. I love it when people pull themselves up by their bootstraps:
Illinois is well known for far exceeding other states where it concerns lucrative salaries for administrators and top teachers, too. As Bill Zettler of Champion News reports, there is no recession in Illinois public schools with salaries from $100,000 a year and up have increased 17% over last fiscal year.
While the rest of us struggle to make ends meet and put off our retirement plans, Illinois school employees continue their unabated raid on public funds. In 2008 fiscal year 11,254 public school employees had salaries greater than $100,000/yr compared to “only†9,591 in 2007. And as we know, the salaries are just the starting point.
If we include all the other goodies taxpayers pay for, including pensions, retirement health insurance and employee insurance, public school employees total compensation is actually about 30% more than their salary. This means that over 40,000 public school employees, or about 25%, have a total compensation of over $100,000/yr.
With salaries like these that are way over priced compared to the private sector, schools crying poor in Illinois rings a bit hollow… or maybe a Big Hollow, as the case may be.
And, needless to say, all this is happening with the tax dollars brought into the Big Hollow School District by the property taxes paid by Lake County citizens. Must be nice to invent out of thin air a taxpayer-supported job and then take it yourself?
Ah, Illinois. Do you smell that smell? It’s public corruption. I love the smell of public corruption in the morning. It smells like… Illinois. Well, I don’t love it but, sadly, I am getting woefully used to it.
Industry, my friends!
Best damn politicians money can buy!
Hey! Anybody seen Rahm Emmanel lately? Dude owes me a job.
That’s four billion dollars in packages over $100k for one city’s government school system and nobody to stem the flood. That’s, nobody to stem the flood.
Chicago seems to embody a concentration of whatever look-the-other-way liberal ultra-stupidity that plagues the cities of MN, WI, and IA and throws those states blue as well. One wonders if it’s discovering how to fleece the constituents/dependents. Not.
You’d hope a little global warming woulda lightened those folks up but now it’s free heating oil for all to go with completely failing to educate kids on $4B in administrator packages. Nice hubris generator they got running there, where arrogance vigorously competes with ignorance.
But hey, they’re so succesful. Shouldn’t success be rewarded?
That aside, it does sounds like this district needs a lot more tech people. One guy for 1800 clients won’t work at all.
I question, though, whether making this guy a big-bucks “director” is going to help with that. Is he going to be pulling cable? Imaging drives? Let’s not be foolish.
Also successful.
Fingers without coffee, although I could claim that I was bein’ all ironic and shit with a deliberate misspelling.
Wow, six percent. Just imagine if they really get on the ball and raise that 50% to nine out of a hundred.
The government schools are being run for someone’s benefit, but it sure isn’t the students’.
Sweet gig.
If you criticize the raises, then you obviously hate children.
Why do we hate the children so?
The $850 billion “stimulus” package has buried, near the end, is Obama’s payoff to the Teachers’ Unions — a huge slush fund that won’t generate one job or new business.
Between this and hearing the yahoos in my union leadership talk about striking over our current salary negotiations – it makes me wonder how bad things will have to get before folks get their heads out of their rectums. Though, they’re teachers, so they’re fairly used to seeing brown…
I thought it was understood that government jobs pay well and aren’t subject to layoffs.
Because the business of America is government.
Remember, this is the district that was run by Barky’s new SecEd. Soon all of our children can aspire to that level of academic success.
Nigel Valentine took ten effin’ years to get a Criminal Justice degree, 5 of which were aspent at a junior college getting an associates degree, and of course blames it on inadequate preparation in public school…And it doesn’t mention him working his way through college…
B-B-But, wasn’t thise years in school part of the time that CAC was underway? When the groundbreaking, highly innovative, theories of Billy Ayers were being applied to the public school system? Certainly that couldn’t be the same school system that Nigel Says failed him, could it?
Just as in DC, and in accord with ultra-liberal principles, they keep throwing money at the problem and never see any concomitant results…
How about actually educating our youth, you know, teaching them how to read, write, cypher, and actual, un-PC-revised history…Focus on giving them the skills to further their academic career, instead of focusing on social justice, or history taught in such a way as to breed resentment…
Give them a base to move forward with, outside of the phony majors like womyn’s/minority’s/hate white male studies…We need more doctors, scientists and engineers, not PC enforcement specialists, specialized government employees, or political science types…
Like Darleen nited, all of this is simply payback to a loyal political faction; one that indoctrinates ever increasing numbers of party members continually…
Geez, Bob,
“scientists and engineers?”
Let’s train our kids to do what tens of millions one Chinese and Indians are willing to do well for $5.00 an hour?
This reminds me of an anecdote Devid Freddoso told in his book about Obama. The one showed up at a high school in Cook County that had begun dismissing the kids after lunch, lacking funds to support an entire school day. The one waxed poetic about the fact that the kids at this majority-minority school couldn’t take chemistry or physics because there weren’t enough hours in the school day, and this was crippling them academically. What BHO didn’t mention was that the average teacher at this school was making a salary of $83,000 a year, and THAT was the reason why the school didn’t have any money.
This guy is either stone dumb or he’s a liar. Either way doesn’t bode well for our nation.
He’s a liar. I think he’s actually very bright for someone at his level.
You really want to watch an inside the union movement civil war? Just watch if/when IL combines the 5 pensions the govt employees have – the teachers have the worst funded one in the US – so they need to raid the IL Municipal Retirement Fund now. AFSCME vs. the teachers…