I submitted a response to the teacher salary increase article. Did it vanish or did you receive it? Lisadisbrow@protonmail.com

Thank you

Before getting worked up on this issue, one should assess (a) existing teacher-compensation structures and (b) what’s being taught.

Transparent California’s salary/benefit compilation for local school districts as of 2021 is available at Web Link .

There, select a chosen county, then a district in that county.

Meanwhile, a leader in CTA’s “East Bay Coalition for Student Success” is the San Ramon Valley Education Association (SRVEA) — i.e., SRVUSD’s radical teacher union.

CURRENT teacher pay scales (before benefits) here, following a recent 8.5% increase, are posted at Web Link . There’s a link there as well for other SRVUSD personnel, including the District’s hugely overcompensated administrators.

A teacher’s 186-day employment year is 9 weeks shorter than the 250-day work year common elsewhere. 250/186 = 1.34. A new bachelor-degreed teacher here gets $61,257 the first year, the equivalent of 1.34 x $61,257 = $82,084 (before benefits)!

As for what’s taught, CTA’s 1984 manual “Guidelines for Academic Freedom in the Public Schools” previewed today’s curriculum, snarling the union’s leftist agenda: “Who dares take on religion, free enterprise, patriotism, and motherhood? We do — and we must!”

Today in SRVUSD, that warped outlook is effectuated in critical race theory lessons dividing captive-audience students into “white supremacist oppressors” and everyone else; in LGBTQ clubs for 4th and 5th graders (with participation concealed from parents); and in homosexual and transgender-themed picture-book read alouds, even in pre-kindergarten classrooms.

Caring, attentive parents with sufficient means should join their kids with those who’ve already left SRVUSD, diminishing this year’s 2018-projected enrollment by 20%. Parents remaining should demand both an end to indoctrination and a renewed concentration on the teaching and learning of knowledge and skills.

@LisaDisbrow -- Your question is the only comment I see. Sorry, but please repost.

A part of me says that public school teachers should be better compensated BUT Mr. Arata also brought up some valid points.

Should we be paying teachers even more money to indoctrinate our young children towards alternative lifestyles and woke theory? These decisions should be based on parental approval and not by school district mandates.

Today over 5% of people under 25 in America now identify as non-binary compared to 1% over two decades ago.

By teachers advising our school-aged children that is OK to be LGBTQ is detrimental to the proper mental and emotional development of a young child.

Let them decide on their own later as adults and school counselors should not be getting involved in this matter as well.

Their job is to offer student guidance on GPAs, SATs, and vocational decisions...not gender identities or sexual dysphorias.

I am a retired SRVUSD high school teacher of many years. My children graduated from the SRVUSD. I am the parent of two current SRVUSD teachers, and the grandparent of two SRVUSD students. It surprises me to hear of what I was supposedly teaching and what is supposedly being taught. I didn’t try to indoctrinate anybody’s child nor would I. I can’t think of a single teacher in my (former) department who would.

I worked long hours, including throughout the summer. I earned every dollar, and chose a teaching career, wanting to help students. I could have made more money elsewhere, considering my educational level.

The constant criticism of SRVUSD teaching professionals is likely to result in an inability to hire the best professionals. Private schools simply do not have the space for an exodus of public school students, nor are all necessarily better (personal experience.) Private schools are not required to have credentialed teachers, meaning that the screening process and educational knowledge may be lower. It depends upon the individual school.

Please be kind and balanced in your responses.

@Mike Arata
Woke Theory and LGBTQ culture should be conveyed (but not advocated) in public schools at the discretion of age appropriateness and parental consent.

The SRVUSD and parents should work together towards arriving at some sort of compromise.

As for the teachers, they deserve to be paid more in yearly salary.

A $100-125K starting point is reasonable especially in the more affluent neighborhoods.

I was myself a successful chemistry teacher and swim coach in the 70s and 80s. I chose teaching and coaching over an offer of early admission to medical school. I too worked long hours, school year and summer — up to 100 hours per week during high school swim seasons.

But so what? I was a teacher and coach by deliberation, not default; I expected / accepted the work levels involved, while realizing that merit pay recognizing my students’ and athletes’ stellar accomplishments was prevented by lockstep teacher unionists and their uniform pay scales, which were based only on accumulated credits and the number of years in place.

My departure from teaching, after 20 years, was motivated by administrative dereliction, the unpunished intrusion of R-rated indoctrination, the suffocating mediocrity induced by union strangleholds on American education, and the prospect of happier circumstances in other realms of endeavor.

Genuine “teaching professionals” don’t engage in the kind of warped activism which has driven many SRVUSD personnel over the last 35 years — most recently, from overtly racist “anti-racism” ( Web Link ) — and Supt. Malloy’s defamation of the Cal High Stunt Team to fit his false “Racist Incident” narrative ( Web Link ) — to what they themselves have characterized as “queering the classroom” ( Web Link ), to featuring vile pornography in high school libraries so that “LGBTQ+” students “can see themselves” [as porn objects] ( Web Link ).

The needed solution for such perversely corrupted behavior, now forty years after the “Nation at Risk” report on American schools, is competition by schools dedicated to the teaching and learning of knowledge and skills. That can be enabled by genuine school choice, wherein tax dollars follow students to schools which they and their parents choose, analogously to the GI Bill.

@Marshawn

What programs/staff should be cut to enable a $100k per year base salary? Last I checked, teachers work 180 days whereas most other people in the country work 260 days a year. Thankfully, I'm not enrolled in SRVUSD schools so I was taught how to do basic math. That tells me that that teachers work typically 30% fewer days than traditional workers. Therefore, teachers make 30% more money than someone in a traditional job with the same salary. Say we have a computer worker making $125k over 260 days and a teacher making $125k over 180 days. The computer worker is making like $485 per day and the teacher would be making $695 a day.

So, explain to me in very basic terms:

1) Why they deserve the exact same dollar amount as other workers in the area and not 30% less given the days worked.

2) Where this money would come from exactly.

@H...the money to pay teachers more would come from a Gavin Newsom fiscal allocation.

Since he is promoting $5M reparations to all CA African American descendents of slavery, the state must be rolling in surplus money.