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.