All 95 teachers and five administrators in the Tuckahoe school district in Westchester County agreed to give $1,000 each to next year’s school budget to keep the area’s tax increase below 3 percent. In the Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow district, 80 percent of the 500 school employees — including teachers, clerks, custodians and bus drivers — have pledged more than $150,000 from their own pockets to help close a $300,000 budget gap.
via Some Teachers in New York Area Offer to Share the Economic Pain – NYTimes.com.
The article mentions three schools in New York State, while going on to mention that four or five more schools in state that haven’t done it despite the issue being suggested. And then it mentions that the issue has arisen in a few New Jersey and Connecticut schools, where the issue has been ignored.
There is a budget gap at my school, as I’m sure there is at yours. But a quick mathematical calculation suggests that in order for my school’s employees to close the budget gap for this coming year by half, as the Tuckahoe school district did, we would need to give up about two months’ salary each, assuming we each make as much as I do (which we don’t). This would be a tremendous pressure on the families in our community, and many of them would be stuck between Scylla and Charybdis on this one. It’s hard to imagine a more painful place to be for a teacher with young children.
