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

The Manchester Union-Leader decided to check into where New Hampshire’s stimulus money was spent. Of the $414 million the state disbursed, more than $160 million went to education, including $68,590 to a youth theater group and $9,375 for a walk-in freezer at an elementary school. In addition:

Manchester, for instance, received $5.9 million in Title I and $4.4 million in Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funding as of Dec. 1, according to the state stimulus office.

The city’s superintendent of schools, Thomas Brennan, said the money allowed “some personnel hires,” including 20 kindergarten teachers, seven high school and middle school assistant principals, and seven elementary school principals, “all working with specialized students under IDEA.”

Brennan said the district hired three transition counselors at the high school level, also under IDEA, to support “specifically identified students.”

The Manchester district certainly is doing its part to provide jobs. While enrollment fell 1.6% between 2002 and 2007, the district increased the number of teachers by 9.7%. And no doubt state employees are being kept busy as they are detached to work for the New Hampshire Office of Economic Stimulus. With the number of government jobs being created, it sounds a little like self-stimulus to me.

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I’ve been wrestling all morning with database problems created by WordPress 2.9 (if you’re having similar problems, these guys seem to be the only ones with the correct answer). It looks like the fix worked, but I’ll have to monitor the blog’s various functions for a while.

In the meantime, National Journal asks about the $23 billion of education jobs money in the latest federal spending spree. My response is here.

The Hazleton Area School District in Pennsylvania will require employees – from the superintendent on down – to punch in and out on a time clock. The policy, which began last year with support personnel, prompted a letter from teacher union president Patricia Cannon.

“I realize that time clocks are a necessity in many other employment areas; however, as a salaried employee, and in the case of teachers using time clocks, I feel they are hurting morale and morale is extremely important in any workplace,” Cannon wrote, adding, “We all need to work together, teachers and administrators, in order to improve the negativity in our district. We need to move forward, not backwards. Time clocks are a move backwards.”

I think time clocks go a long way to improve the negativity in the district. Judging by the comments below the article, negativity is more robust than ever.

We’ve already told the tale of the efforts of the California Teachers Association to apply the brakes to legislation designed to improve the state’s chances of grabbing some of that Race to the Top money. Not surprisingly, other state unions are using similar tactics:

* Alan Lubin of New York State United Teachers thinks raising the state’s charter cap to 400 is “ridiculous.” (New York enrolls more than 2.7 million students.)

* Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association, calls his state’s RTT proposal “prescriptive, topdown and unreasonable.”

* Stephen Sawchuk of Teacher Beat notes Massachusetts and Kansas essentially give their unions veto power over their plans.

* Along the same lines in North Carolina, “As part of the application process, each district’s school board chairman and superintendent must sign a memorandum committing to follow the grant’s standards, to be sent to the state as soon as possible. The local representative of the North Carolina Association of Educators must sign as well.” What’s the problem with that? Well, North Carolina has more than 104,000 teachers, but NCAE only has 48,000 active members.

On the other hand, teachers’ unions in Louisiana are making supportive noises.

While everyone is going ape-crazy over a piddling $4.3 billion, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill (217-212) that includes a $23 billion education jobs fund for which NEA lobbied intensively (see item #2 here).

Just to piggyback on stories about emergency meetings at SEIU and AFL-CIO to discuss their positions on the Senate health care reform bill, NEA is making its position plain – though its main bellyache is not the lack of a public option, but the presence of the excise tax on so-called Cadillac insurance plans.

“NEA is a strong advocate of health care reform,” [NEA President Dennis] Van Roekel said. ”But we cannot support a plan that is paid for at the expense of hard working Americans who can least afford it. We remain committed to real reform that builds on and strengthens our existing employer-based system and we remain opposed to an excise tax that jeopardizes the middle class and asks nothing of the wealthiest Americans.”

The Wilmington Ballet Academy of the Dance in Delaware has performed The Nutcracker every Christmas season since 1967. This year the not-for-profit school has been forced to cut costs, which meant using non-union musicians for the first time. But the American Federation of Musicians Local 21 wasn’t going to just pack up its sugar plums and go away. Beth Moore, the academy’s president, explains:

The academy filed for a restraining order against the union to prevent it from harassing its musicians or disrupting the performance. William Berger, president of Local 21, said the complaint read like “a pity party” and complained, “They’ve got money for everything but musicians.”

By the strangest coincidence, soon after this story appeared in the Wilmington News Journal, the union settled its differences with the academy.  Merry Christmas!