Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Danville District 118 Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Danville Community Consolidated School District 118 Board of Education

September 13, 2010

In this financially trying time, the Board is struggling to preserve a level of high quality education. We are using federal monies to bring back dismissed teachers, preserve programs, maintain class sizes, but these monies only go so far. Our schools depend heavily on state aide which is no longer as easily forthcoming. We need our teachers to do their part and take a salary freeze for one year yet not reduce their benefits, most important of which is health insurance. We also sought to explore ways to compensate them in the future years. One of our proposals was to pay merit bonuses if our students’ test scores improved.

Unfortunately, all of our proposals were rejected by the DEA. Despite telling the public that the teachers did not seek a raise for its highest paid teachers, the DEA sought increased salaries for all teachers and non-certified employees that averaged approximately 3% for teachers in each of 2 years and between 4% and 5% for non-certified employees.

The DEA needs to be straight with the public – they claim that they are for school safety but only if we pay the teachers’ legal fees if they are charged with a criminal offense. They want us to spend federal monies for education but only if a substantial portion goes to increase their salaries. They want us to hire additional nurses but only if we hire nurses with teaching degrees when none of our nurses teach. They claim to care about students, but they threatened to shut down our football program unless the Board capitulates to their demands. And, they want the Board to pay half of the DEA President’s salary to do Union business rather than teach our children.

We want to pay our teachers fairly, but we also want to preserve quality education for our students. We will continue to meet with the teachers to bring about a resolution of this unfortunate strike but we cannot agree to a settlement that risks the financial health of our school system.

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6 comments:

  1. The criminal offenses are if a student attacks a teacher and the teacher is forced to restrain the student to keep the student from hurting themselves, the staff, or other students, which has happened and I have a few friends and know of a few others who have had bite marks, blood drawn from fingernails, and bruises due to a students aggressive behavior. These are just minor things as I have heard of a few teachers who had to seek medical treatment due to students. Now if the parent comes back on the teacher do you not think the district should help protect and defend the teachers?

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  2. Danville is a depressed community at this point in time. Taxes are being raised, we pay so much more just to have our garbage removed, the Health Dep't has had to greatly reduce services to the community and on and on and on. I just ask that the teachers on strike consider the desperate conditions locally and truely put the students they were hired to teach(at a very nice pay scale with good benefits)before letting those students down by shutting the school district down as they seek more money for themselves. I am a senior citizen and I would like a pay raise also; didn't happen last year, not going to happen this year. Perhaps a change in the DEA's top position would be a step in the right direction....oh, and perhaps the tip top of the administrators could give back some of their recent pay increases.....got to be fair!

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