Common ground still can be found in troubled season
March isn’t just the month for wild excitement on school basketball courts. It’s also the month for a much sadder task. By law, schools have to notify teachers by the end of March if they intend to lay them off in the coming year. Thus, the news headlines often reflect a kind of depressing scorekeeping this time of year — 114 layoffs eyed in Indian Prairie Unit District 204, 78 considered in Schaumburg Elemtary District 54, 30 approved this week in Palatine Township Elementary District 15. The list goes on.
Even though many laid-off teachers are called back to work later in the year when enrollments and budgeting for the coming year are more certain, this annual rite is always draped in dark tones. In purely human terms, it reflects the distress of lost jobs. In the school setting, it raises the specter of larger classes and lost programs. No community can ever find anything to celebrate in such prospects. And in recent years, it has acquired an additional, nasty edge amid increasing pressures on school budgets and, in Illinois, a pension crisis that, not always fairly, has put teachers on the defensive.
That edge was evident this week when teachers at District 15 turned out en masse to protest plans for 30 layoffs among $6 million-plus in spending cuts to fill an expected $9.6 million budget deficit.
“For the last several years, we’ve regularly encountered a barrage of falsehoods, innuendo and propaganda designed solely to make teachers look bad, to make us appear falsely like we were greedy, lazy or uncaring,” Classroom Teachers’ Council President Lisa Nuss complained to the school board.
Such stereotypes are uncomfortably new for teachers, who as a class have tended to rank among the nation’s most-respected professions. The stereotypes are also unnecessary, and from both sides of the equation, teachers and administrators in District 15 soon will have an opportunity to help dispel — or at least diminish — them.
That process began with the school board’s promise to continue to seek budget solutions that don’t involve layoffs or program cutbacks. And it continued with the board’s concurrence with Nuss’ call to conclude negotiations for a new contract — to replace one expiring Aug. 31 — “in good faith” and before the end of the school year.
Most school districts, as other public bodies, cannot escape the crass rigors of the current economy. But they can escape the kind of mean-spirited negativism that often accompanies budgeting in hard times. It starts with everyone taking a moment to reflect on the other side’s problems.
Teachers must recognize that school boards aren’t all corporate raiders out to fatten the bottom line for fat-cat stockholders. School boards must reaffirm teachers aren’t lazy, selfish gluttons looking to sloppily do as little work as possible before retiring to a fat pension. We suspect most people on either side of the bargaining table recognize these things, but they’re easily forgotten amid the stress of deadlines and tight budgets.
It was good to note Superintendent Scott Thompson’s optimism that common ground can be found in District 15. With understanding and cooperation, it will. With name calling, suspicion and innuendo, it will not. It’s an important distinction for all of us to keep in mind during this season of gloomy scorekeeping.