FWEA Lies (Surprise, Surprise!)
Posted by Jeff Pruitt - 5/23/10 @ 8:11 pm - Filed Under Featured, Local Politics
There’s nothing more frustrating than reading traditional media pieces in which they allow establishment characters to blatantly lie without at least requiring them to explain their position. There was a story on Indiana News Center a couple of weeks ago where this occured. This story was related to the 311 teacher layoffs happening at FWCS at what could’ve been done to prevent it. Here’s the official union position:
Union representatives said that no concessions could have been made to prevent the layoffs.
That, my friends, is as blatant of a lie as one will ever read and it’s ridiculous that it was aired completely unchallenged. We had several posts here at FWP ( here, here and here) outlining steps that could be taken to prevent teacher layoffs. These were common sense approaches that would have started to fix the structural deficit problems that will continue to plague FWCS.
Given these union obfuscations and their inability to protect teachers why in the world would any young teacher join the union? They voted to eliminate your job without any discussion on how it might be saved. And would it be too much to ask that FWEA fix their website? It has been down for weeks now. Every member pays $600/year and yet FWEA can’t afford a nickel’s worth of extra bandwidth?
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3 Responses to “FWEA Lies (Surprise, Surprise!)”
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I believe FWEA is doing what the majority of its members want and their leadership just has an innate talent for conveying its arrogance. No concessions in pay, benefits or changes from layoffs by seniority. They don’t have any other way to do it anyway since there is no objective way to measure teacher performance. That’s what makes these excess layoff notices to restaff the failing schools such a farce and makes it hard to feel sorry for them.
I don’t know why any talented graduates coming out of college would want to teach in a unionized urban schools district, period. They might as well work at GM and join the UAW.
The JG reported that 96% of 760 FWEA members voted to accept the negotiated contract in March. If my public school math is correct, that is about 730 yes votes from over 2000 teachers. Approximately 36.5 percent…not exactly a majority. You have to wonder about the other 1270 teachers…don’t they care to vote? Or are they not members because they feel the union does not represent them? Are they embarassed by their union? Does the FWEA even release membership information to determine how many teachers are actually members?
I am disappointed that the teacher insurance share was not increased to 15% or 20% in order to save teacher jobs. I would like to hear from FWEA as to whether this was on the bargaining table or not.
I’ve been told that close to 90% of FWCS teachers belong to FWEA. At $600 a year, that would indicate that most of them support the FWEA stance even if they don’t vote. Contributions to their PAC, which helps elect a compliant board are voluntary in addition to the dues.