Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

* Iowa legislators were unable to develop compromise amendments to a bill that would expand the scope of collective bargaining, so the bill will go to Gov. Chet Culver as is for signature or veto. Culver has expressed misgivings about the legislation, but he is closely tied to the state’s unions. He has 30 days to decide.

* The Missouri House passed a bill that would create teacher councils as a structure to negotiate labor contracts. The legislation is an effort to comply with a state supreme court decision that granted collective bargaining rights to public employees. Missouri NEA is unhappy with the bill because it doesn’t allow exclusivity – any organization that can prove it represents more than 10 percent of the employees in a bargaining unit gets a seat on the council.

* Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle vetoed card check legislation earlier this week, and Democratic lawmakers say they don’t have the votes to override it – even though there were only 8 “no” votes in the House, 4 “no” votes in the Senate, and the bill had 41 co-sponsors. Can you say “lip service?”

Last year the Columbus, Ohio, school district failed to spend $3.4 million in federal Title I grants.

This year the district overspent its grant by $735,000.

The Columbus Dispatch reports:

Varying salaries and benefits for employees caused the problem in this
year’s audit, said Jeff Warner, spokesman for the district.

The district estimates that it will spend $60,000 per employee on
salaries and benefits, he said. When the actual figure is higher — because
teachers either have enough experience or education to be higher on the salary
schedule in the teachers union contract — schools go over their budgets, he
said.

“We’ve been more aggressive trying to see that the services that were
planned were performed,” Warner said. “The bulk of the question is labor.”

This is how you determine what the labor costs will be? You WAG it? No wonder the kids aren’t learning math.

In a twist on the usual seniority-based layoff story, about 75 teachers in Seminole County, Florida – most of whom have 35 years or more of experience – are being let go because they lack seniority.

These old-timers signed up for Florida’s Deferred Retirement Option Program (DROP) five years ago, which was an effort to keep experienced teachers in the classroom during the state’s enrollment boom and class size reduction. DROP teachers are essentially allowed to retire, but their pension payments are put aside until they actually stop working.

Now that the five-year term of the program is up, the DROP teachers are eligible to be rehired for up to three more years. The problem is that they dropped their seniority when they entered the program, so these veteran teachers are now near the bottom of the seniority scale.

The solution here is simple: Flip a coin.

Click here to read:

1) New York Members Form National Merger Caucus
2) California Teachers Association Announces “Voluntary” Dues Hike
3) Union Finds 57 Moonlighting Teachers in Texas
4) That Didn’t Take Long
5) All Executive Director, All the Time!
6) School District Tables for Alabama, Alaska and Arizona Posted
7) Last Week’s Intercepts
8) Quote of the Week