Letter to School Board: Saying Sorry Would Have Gone A Long Way

If you know me personally, as several of you do, you remember how upset I was about the School Board's decision to take away health care benefits from the teaching aides. This decision was wrong both economically and morally.

From the moral standpoint, I believe that everyone deserves access to affordable health care. If the district offers health care benefits, they should be available to all employees without exception. And certainly coverage should be available to the lowest paid employees. It is very wrong to balance the budget on the backs of the employees at the bottom of the pay scale. The school district did not decide that teaching aides were not needed in the schools, just that they wanted to pay them much less for the same work.

The decision to eliminate health care benefits for the teaching aides essentially makes any who stayed on and who opted to enroll in COBRA ‘employee volunteers’ earning less than $10,000/year. As was demonstrated in a speaker’s comments at the most recent Board of Education meeting, most aides make less than $30,000/year, while COBRA benefits for a family cost $15-20,000/year.

From the economic standpoint, the 'discovery' of the $5.7 million surplus only affirms what I thought in the spring. And now, according to the presentation of the budget group at the meeting, it turns out the surplus is not $5.7 million. It was as high as $11 million at the end of June, and is now over $7 million.

At the meeting [District Business Administrator] Dana Sullivan said she was well aware during the last budget cycle that the district was not under extreme financial pressure, and that in fact the money that would be needed for the budget was there. All the talk about school closings, outsourcing of the aides, etc. came from what she understood to be the Board’s insistence on ‘long-term sustainability’.

And as we now know the result was the surplus (see above!).

Budget issues that included contract renegotiation could have, should have waited for this year while other budget options were implemented. Sustainable cost saving/revenue generating efforts discussed at length at last spring’s Board of Education meetings have not even left the starting blocks (like renting school facilities, a proposal that could generate as much as $1 million/year).

The Board should not have forced the aides into agreeing to a separate, bad deal, knowing that the contract for all teachers was due for negotiation this year. Health care costs, salary increases, other benefits, etc, are all negotiable items in a contract that MUST include all employees.

Last spring I thought that both the Board and (last year’s) union leadership were equally culpable in the budget fiasco. Now with the information revealed in the last two meetings—that there is a very large surplus, and that the doom and gloom, emergency urgency of last year’s budget exercise was not based on the actual financial situation of the district—makes me much more sympathetic to the union. Indeed, the union opened up their contract in 2009-10, and then the board made them out to be the bad guys for not opening their contract again in 2010. And now the board is saying that the only way that benefits can be restored is if the union opens its contract ... that the ball is entirely in the union’s court, that the Board has no way to remedy it. It is very upsetting to hear the Board not take responsibility for it’s own mistakes.

I agree with several people at the meeting who said that a simple acknowledgement of regret for the mistakes made would have gone a long way.

But no such statement was made except towards the very end of the meeting by new board member Norman Rosenblum (who had not participated in the decision). Rather, [School Board President] Shelly Lombard and other members of the board continued to insist that the decisions made were right, and that ‘sustainability’ is the most important factor to be considered. What Ms. Lombard means by ‘sustainability’ was revealed when she talked about all the folks who had come to her in past years pleading for tax relief.

But, she said, these people did not come to meetings last year, and instead contacted her on the side. They said they had friends who had children at Edgemont or Renaissance, or had friends who were aides and did not want to be ‘on the record’ as supporting the cuts. According to Shelly, these unnamed people had lost financial industry jobs at places like UBS (financial sector employees were also cited by [Township Councilor] Cary Africk in his comments), and were now worried about keeping their homes in Montclair.

I’m a Montclair taxpayer, and my family, like others, lost health insurance as a result of your cuts. Many of the teaching aides are Montclair taxpayers. How can they continue to afford to live here without decent jobs? Many of the teachers, who are being asked to remedy the Board’s mistaken assessment of the budget are also Montclair taxpayers. Their ability to stay in their homes is just as important as that of financial industry employees. It is the responsibility of the Board to serve the whole community.