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

The Voice of San Diego reports, “A left-leaning think tank has highlighted San Diego Unified as an example of a school system that is tackling poverty to help students, pointing out that some schools double as food stamp enrollment centers.”

A new report from the Center for American Progress, Reducing Student Poverty in the Classroom, singled out a San Diego program that signs up families for the food stamp program at school.

The San Diego Local Initiatives Support Coalition estimates that volunteers have counseled more than 600 families at the four participating schools, resulting in a monthly benefit total of $39,116 for these families.

That’s roughly $65 per month per family. But because of the “funding” mechanism for the edujobs bill, each family of four on food stamps will lose $59 per month of benefits.

Thanks to the exemplary efforts of the school system, these families will net 20 cents per day in additional food stamp benefits. Way to tackle poverty! You’ll have to save up for the frozen vegetables, though.

Click here to read:

1) Tsunami of Campaign Cash from NEA Headquarters

2) Pending Ratification Vote, Ohio Education Association Employees Return to Work

3) Not Too Busy in North Carolina

4) More District Spending Tables Posted

5) The Long Arm of History

6) Last Week’s Intercepts

7) Quote of the Week

Ballotpedia took on the thankless task of gathering together the results of local school bond and tax levy elections for 2010 for a group of states. What they found suggests it’s not all that difficult to get those things passed.

Even in this economy, 519 of 728 bonds and levies were approved by voters in 2010 – an affirmative rate of 71.3%. Indeed, only New Jersey seemed to have serious difficulty passing such measures, but then, it has been an unusual year in New Jersey.

After a large rally on Friday that included members, local officers and NEA affiliate staffers from other states, Ohio Education Association management and staff returned to the bargaining table and hammered out an agreement Friday night.

Details of the settlement were not available, but the staff union hopes to hold a ratification vote during the weekend to put an end to the strike and have employees return to work Monday morning.

This was a long strike by NEA affiliate standards, but not unheard of. The 1997 OEA strike lasted three weeks.

NEA New Mexico is running a television ad supporting Democrat Diane Denish for governor. The ad features Las Cruces special education teacher Freda Trujillo and claims Republican candidate Susana Martinez would cut public education funding (the original ad is apparently unavailable on the Internet). What’s so unusual about that? Nothing, except the union failed to determine if using Trujillo in the ad might present some complications.

Oops. Martinez was the district attorney in Las Cruces and her office was responsible for convicting Trujillo’s ex-husband. They married in 2004 – after the crime – but it isn’t known when they divorced.

NEA New Mexico responded, attributing this to Trujillo:

“‘I hope that the Martinez campaign is not behind this personal attack on me and my integrity as a public educator for exercising my First Amendment rights. I hope that the Martinez campaign has better things to do with their time than attacking teachers who support Diane Denish. There are important issues to talk about in this campaign. The public deserves to hear about these important issues. Discussion of my private life adds nothing to this discourse. And I call on the Martinez campaign, if involved, to stop attacking me. I also call upon the press to cover the important educational issues, in which I so strongly believe, rather than my private life and personal pain.”

The Ohio Education Association is looking for a staff accountant and an administrative secretary. The latter is a “challenging and rewarding position” and both jobs promise “generous fringe benefits.” Apply now. Your future colleagues are standing by to greet you.

The $10 billion edujobs bill was signed into law on August 10. Its stated purpose was to save the jobs of 160,000 educators. I, and many others, thought the need for the bill was based on some highly questionable numbers, but once that battle was lost, I was prepared to move on.

Except with each morning comes a new reminder about its flaws. Let’s begin with this wonderful little chart from the National Council on Teacher Quality:

NCTQ also notes that since the publication of this chart, San Francisco rehired 208 laid-off teachers.

Anecdotal? Sure. But anecdotal evidence is more evidence than the Council of Economic Advisors had. As NCTQ reports, “It turns out the numbers it cited were not based on any actual need reported by districts or their states. They never surveyed districts on how many layoffs they were facing nor did they collect data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

We move on to Stateline.org, which published a story on September 3 detailing the problems some states were having with the bill’s fine print. It stated:

It’s almost impossible to estimate how many teachers have been laid off so far around the country but experts put the number somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said the new legislation would protect 161,000 jobs.

Unfortunately for Stateline, timing is everything, and the very same day the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly report on America’s employment situation. Table B-1 disaggregates the statistics by sector. The vast majority of educators fall into the “Local Government – Education” category. The nearly 8 million employees in this category include superintendents, managers, principals, specialists and other workers not covered by the edujobs bill. Nevertheless, the total workforce in August 2010 consisted of 56,500 fewer employees than it did in August 2009. That’s a reduction of 0.7 percent, which isn’t much worse than the reduction in enrollment. It also fits quite nicely with NEA’s estimate of membership loss, pre-edujobs.

Yesterday, the Argus-Leader reported that the bill may cost some South Dakota school districts money, and the San Bernardino Sun listed the local California districts that are saving the edujobs money for next year, mainly because they didn’t lay off many (or any) teachers this year. This morning, the Columbus Post Dispatch noted that the Ohio district was doing the same thing (96 of pink-slipped 113 teachers had already been rehired).

Don’t forget: the House was recalled to special session to vote on the bill because it was supposed to require immediate action. The people who surrendered their food stamp increases will be happy to know the money is sitting in school district bank accounts, earning interest.

UPDATE: Pennsylvania and Idaho join the list of the awakened.