"I know Tom Vereline, and mister..."

[Chris_Wendt]

...you are no Tom Vereline." (Paraphrasing Lloyd Bentsen, responding to Dan Quayle's remarks about Jack Kennedy)

Tom Vereline is the current President of the WUT. I have worked with him, and have broken bread with him over the years. I know him to be honorable, honest, capable and a very effective leader. He leads the teachers union, the lawful collective bargaining unit for our teachers, the people who are the very heart and soul of our school district. Tom and the WUT have a purpose and a job to do. They do their job very well and fulfill their purpose as a collective bargaining union most admirably. They certainly deserve our respect.

No union, no union leader ever once gave any employee(s) a raise or improved anyone's benefits; all raises and benefits enjoyed by our teachers were granted either by the Board of Education, or by the State Legislature and Governors down through the ages. The union is not the enemy, nor are the teachers they represent or the leaders they elect to speak for them. Let's not demonize them, and let's not cede to them power which they do not actually possess.

That, in prior years, the Board of Education was liberal with terms and conditions and money for the teachers, was not any doing of the union. That the district's labor counsel had been ineffective in negotiating harder with the union is not the fault of the union.

A few years ago Wantagh, Seaford, Plainedge, Bethpage, and Island Trees school boards formed the "Cost Conscious Consortium". When I suggested to the members gathered together at Plainedge High one evening that we should put together a list of common bargaining strategies and formulate specific objectives for changing all of our teacher contracts, errant terms like "collusion" and "illegal" were spouted and bandied about from members of the various districts' boards. Was our collective failure, as neighboring school boards in high-tax school districts, to work together in a unified approach to fundamentally changing teacher contracts in the Southeast Quadrant of Nassau County...was that failure the union's fault? Certainly NOT!

Unhappy with the terms, conditions, and cost of the Wantagh Teachers Contract? Don't blame the WUT, its leadership, or its members.

Right now, our Board of Education is attempting work with the union to make changes in that contract, changes to terms, conditions and the cost of that contract that have developed and persisted for decades. Our Board of Education has a very tall order to fill. They need our support.

Our ""SUPPORT"" of the Board of Education does NOT extend to poking the teachers or their union or their president in the eye with a stick, and then expecting them to make nice with the school board and to make concessions to save US money.

Come on, let's stop the family squabbling, alright?

Chris Wendt

"Gentlemen, we must all hang together, else we shall most certainly all hang separately!" (Ben Franklin to the Second Continental Congress, as he stepped up to sign the Declaration of Independence)

[ducky]

I am glad you find them to be friends and enjoy their company but based on what I hear and see they are not responding to the clear needs of the community and the students. They want more more more when in fact they are making more than the people who are paying them. They have been very well rewarded over the years by poor negotiating on our part. Now given the economic emergency we ask for some consideration and get nothing.

[Chris_Wendt]

To Ducky's observation:
"They have been very well rewarded over the years by poor negotiating on our part. Now given the economic emergency we ask for some consideration and get nothing."

I can only add: "...yet."

I would also change to the subjunctive mood: "...but have gotten nothing yet."

We have good Board members representing our interests in negotiating a new teacher contract. The bargaining has reached a legal impasse and has entered the mandatory mediation phase. There is another mediation session scheduled in March among the negotiators for the District and for the Union with the mediator.

I believe the Board of Education is acutely aware of the needs of the District and of the community.

Eventually this contract will be settled and then we all must be willing and able to continue to work together for the good of the District and community. Heightened passions and pokes in the eye notwithstanding.

Chris Wendt

[lilly]

That's great that you have a high opinion of Mr. Vereline. I have spoken to him briefly at BOE meetings (and with the exception of his comments at a recent BOE meeting) do have a favorable impression.

However, I could give a rat's patootie if Wantagh has or doesn't have a teacher union. Parent, taxpayer, really not big on my list of things to think about. My concerns, as they should be, are 1) mine & the community's kids including the quality of their education 2) my taxes and ability to pay them, as well as my neighbor's and 3) effective/efficient spending of my tax $'s in good economic times & bad.

I do start to care about the presence of a union if/when its machinations affects any of the above. And right now it is. We lost a good teacher with last one in, first one out. We are facing big ticket "mandated" expenses such as pension & medical increases.

I do not know exactly what is going on with the BOE and the WUT but I do know I should be concerned about it.

I truly am not baiting the teachers union. I'll even overlook trolls who are righteously indignant about comments here bc I am going to assume the nice thing, that it stems from pride in their jobs.

Right now:

"Houston, we have a problem."

"If you're not part of the solution, you are part of the problem."

None of it can be resolved on a stupid message board. When I screamed in the other thread "WHO IS GOING TO PAY FOR IT?" and to please offer suggestions, I truly meant it. We have a problem, we're all in it together, what do you (WUT) suggest we do about it? Seriously.... Do they understand budget pressures and that salary & benefits in Wantagh are the lion's share (higher than 72% but less than 80% depending on the year) of expenditures? I hope I'm not asking these questions naively. Come to a BAC, whatever needs to happen. But don't clock out at 3 or 4 and have a good night's sleep thinking all is well. It's clearly not and it involves them.

[Chris_Wendt]

Lilly, as per usual, is on-target with this nugget:
"None of it can be resolved on a stupid message board. "

The teachers contract, meaning the salary schedule, work rules, and benefits contribution level, can only be 'solved' at the negotiating table (including mediation or such other facets of collective bargaining that are available) and only by the Board of Education and the WUT Negotiating Committee, followed by ratification by a majority of our teachers.

Teacher Retirement costs, meaning TRS (pension fund) and OPEB (post-retirement health costs) can only be addressed by the State Legislature and the Governor. Now, if the Board of Education does not take a hard line to monetize the present and future cost increases for TRS & OPEB as part of the "Total Compensation" of the teachers, then they will only perpetuate and worsen the huge disconnect between salaries and benefit costs, both of which will continue to escalate, resulting in ever more pain in Wantagh as the years progress.

Who gets hurt by the Board and the Union both failing to realize and combine the financial effects of salary schedule increases, step-and-grade increments, health care, OPEB, pensions and paid time-off?

• Taxpayers
  
• Kids
  
• Individual teachers
  
• the health and maintenance of the school buildings
  
• the district's credit rating

Not surprisingly, the very first individual teachers to get the ax are considered by all who know them to be excellent teachers.

We ALL know there are ways to save those jobs, but doing that, saving those 4 jobs, or NOT doing that, is ENTIRELY up to Tom Vereline and the WUT on a quid-pro-quo basis. I think it would cost $330K for one year, a million dollars over 3 years. Are they worth that kind of money to the WUT?

While the WUT mulls over how they can come up with a $1 Million quid-pro-quo to save the first four jobs, they can also prognosticate about who are the next group of teachers on the chopping block, you know, next year, and the year after that. All our teachers are here in Wantagh to teach our kids, and to build stable, professional careers as members of the Wantagh family. None of them should be subject to the stress and anxiety of having their livelihoods and their careers put in jeopardy by the intransigence of their own union.

Hey, here's another idea. How many more years are some very senior teachers going to hang-on before they retire and collect their rather comfortable pensions? If four (4) senior teachers in the right tenure area could re-evaluate their own situations and put in their retirement papers before this year is out, then they could save those four junior teachers' careers. But those are extremely personal decisions, and not legitimate subjects of bargaining to be raised by the District (or, by me).

But what cannot work is everybody protecting their own personal ox from being gored in this financial melee. You can't go wailing to our State Senator "stop the school board from firing those 4 teachers!" and then go yell at the school board: "don't change our attendance zones!"; "...don't redistrict using the Princeton Plan!"; "...don't touch my kid's sports team!"; ...don't raise our taxes!"; "...where's our Smart Boards"; "...where's our full-day kindergarten?"; "...how come the bathrooms in the high school don't work?"

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There is a truly amazing level of interest recently about whom I am "talking to". Not only interest, but some actual "concern"! Rest assured, I speak with pretty much anyone who reaches out to me, with one lone exception. I also reach out on my own dime to many people on a variety of issues.

We have no enemies here. If you think we do, guess again.

We cannot be as a family if we are going to huddle in camps divided against other camps, and therefore divided against the whole. They tried that in 1861 with disastrous results. We cannot scheme against the school budget in hopes of gaining retribution for circumstances which originate far from our little enclave here on the South Shore of Long Island. We cannot vilify the people who are our schools, and then cry crocodile tears when some of them fall as casualties to our own failure to have worked things out differently.

Are we a 'House divided against itself...'?

That is certainly not for me.

Chris Wendt