Detroit Extorting its Own Teachers to Meet Payroll

[megimoo]

Detroit Extorting its Own Teachers to Meet Payroll, forcing them to make $10k no interest “loans”

Detroit’s school system is disintegrating by the week.

Detroit has sunk to robbing its own teachers to scrape payroll funds together. Public School teachers are being extorted by their City with the full cooperation of their own union.

Under a proposal submitted for membership ratification each INDIVIDUAL teacher will be forced to “loan” the City of Detroit $10,000 in $250.00 increments ripped out of their bi-monthly checks for 40 weeks starting in January. These “loans” are repayable upon retirement or resignation WITHOUT interest.

If this story was happening under George Bush in a Republican state instead of in liberal Democrat Detroit Michigan it would be the lead story across America.

Bad choice; worse choice

The alternative plan, in case the victims turn this one down, is for the school system to cut teacher salaries by $36,000!

How extorting $10,000 “voluntarily” from the teachers would solve the problem, but $36,000 involuntarily extorted from these teacher victims is required to solve the crisis wasn’t explained.

Maybe it’s time to just shut Detroit down

The National Assessment of Educational Progress that measures the mathematics abilities of grade school children released a report this week showing Detroit’s 4th and 8th graders had the worst scores in the country and the history of these tests.

Just 31% of 4th graders and 23% of 8th graders scored at or above grade level.
Fifty years of corrupt Democrat governance has finally crushed the last flickers of life out of Detroit’s schools.

Keep in mind Detroit is the city that recently saw its Council President (John Conyers’ wife Monica) sent to federal prison for SELLING her vote to a contractor.

A City without a functioning public school system can’t survive no matter how the media lies about the situation. People can’t live where their children can’t get educated.

It’s everybody’s fault so it’s NOBODY’S fault

Naturally all the liberal Democrats concerned blamed everybody else.
“The principals were to blame.”

“The curriculum was at fault.”

Of course the crooks in the City government WERE NOT to blame nor were the Democrat Governor Jennifer Granholm or the parents of the school kids who don’t do their job of seeing to their own child’s progress or attending parent/teacher nights. PTA meetings? Please.


http://www.collinsreport.net/

[Last Samurai]

I suppose it goes without saying that it is not the fault of the Teacher's Union either. ;)

LS

[noonwitch]

One thing that's important to point out about the DPS is that the school board is a separate entity from the rest of the city government. Kwame and Monica Conyers have had little to do with the school board.


The governor put a special administrator (Robert Bobb) in charge last year. Former Governor Engler did a similar thing, and didn't have much better results, in the 90s.

There's plenty of blame to go around-teachers, administrators, parents (where the most blame lies), the third world-level poverty that is rampant in Detroit, and so on. The teachers are paid more than you might think to work in a poor city with no money. A teacher in the DPS who has the same educational level and seniority as I do with the state makes at least $10,000 a year more than I make, and that teacher gets 3 months off every year, when you count summer and all the breaks during the school year.

The one person I don't blame is Robert Bobb-he has been working his butt off to fix the schools. He's the one who cleaned up the payroll last spring because he found out that there were a lot of people collecting checks who weren't working. He made all the employees report for their paychecks on one payday, and present ID to get them. Once he did that, he was able to get rid of all the fraud in that system, and he took the money he found and fixed some of the deteriorating school buildings. There is no way the system could be fixed quickly, after 20+ years of being one of the worst school systems in the nation.

I've been watching the Detroit schools for about 22 years, as a social worker who visits kids in school, attends IEPCs for special ed, and has to intervene at times to prevent the district from kicking a kid out. They do two things well-advanced education at schools like Renaissance and Cass Tech, where the students have to take a test prior to enrolling and must maintain a B average to stay in the program; and special education, where the one advantage to a big district is that a class/program can be developed for every special need, and kids with very different needs from each other are not lumped into the same classroom just because they have a similar diagnosis. The Head Start program is also pretty decent, but as it's federally funded, it's also federally supervised to a degree.


One of the judges at juvenile court once said on the record "The Detroit Public Schools are not under my jurisdiction, unfortunately". That's kind of how all of us who work with kids, but aren't part of the school system feel about it.