All sides should seek pension solutions

While the idea of asking school districts to pay the pension costs for teachers isn’t realistic because of the huge expense, it will shine a bright light on total pension costs for teachers, which is a good thing.

In my experience, over the years school boards have taken no responsibility for controlling pension costs because it was “Springfield’s problem.” As a result, it was easy for them to give generous salary increases if they could find the money in the annual budget and to ignore, if not encourage, “spiking” salaries at the end of a teacher’s career to inflate the level of the pension. Since there doesn’t appear to be enough money available to continue all these practices, we need the public to provide some “adult supervision” for the difficult negotiations that are coming.

Regardless of your politics, now’s the time to get involved in making decisions to create a sustainable approach to teacher salaries and pensions, something we clearly don’t have now.

Willard Bishop

Barrington Hills