“Pink slips for 1,000 educators”

[. . .] But Kulongoski and legislators can't separate themselves from the consequences of their actions. They can't call a budget inadequate and then distance themselves from the cuts that follow. They certainly can't call any plan that could eliminate between 955 and 2,882 middle-class jobs in Oregon a step on the road to economic recovery.

“Past losses add to PERS costs”

TIGARD -- Despite widespread cost-cutting changes in 2003, the amount Oregon's school districts and state and local governments pay for pensions will increase in July, the Public Employees Retirement System said Tuesday.

Much of the increase is the result of PERS continuing to pay for stock market losses on the investment of pension funds before 2003.
The additional pension costs are expected to total about $300 million a year.

There is a new labor organization dedicated to serving new non-tier-one and non-tier-two PERS beneficiary teachers in Portland. It is called Associated Portland Educators (APE). It covers the same territory as that of the Portland Association of Teachers (PAT).

While Julia Brimm Edwards recently noted in a letter to The Oregonain that the Portland Public School District has been more cooperative with labor she neglected to say that the district has rolled over backwards for PAT while they simultaneously refused to acknowledge the existence of this other labor organization. The district does not, therfore support labor, they support PAT, in particular, which is a far cry from supporting labor.

The Oregonian, the Portland Public Schools, the Public Employees Retirement Board and even the Governor all seem to speak with one voice – the payment of extra, and previously unbudgeted, dollars to past teachers for past services takes priority over actual teaching today. The Oregonian repeatedly claims that the school districts are helpless when it comes to the PERS obligation that spring up in the current budget cycle for past work. These folks are simply off their rocker.

The Portland Public School District refused to let me distribute a one page flier to the new teachers in Portland who attended an August 25-26 Orientation session. PAT got 2 and a half hours of time to present their propaganda to the new teachers while they were being paid by the district. My flier was intended to inform the new teachers of their bargaining rights and how they conflict with the political and representational position of the Tier-One and Tier-Two PERS beneficiary teachers and how membership in PAT is against their interest.

If I vigorously oppose PAT it is not because I am against labor rights it is because I am the only one trying to actually represent the genuine labor rights of the new teachers and I am the only one offering a path to keeping the schools open all year long. The cohesive group of four noted above want to wave the threat of cutting teachers, specifically the new teachers, and wave the threat of cutting school days and athletics and all the other things that make a school great.

I brought the issue of the paid teacher time during the new teacher orientation days, where PAT made their presentations to the captive audience, before the Tax Supervising and Conservation Commission. They decided on January 12, 2005, not to seek to demand that someone at the Portland Public Schools cover the expense as an unlawful one because it provided support to a particular labor organization. The TSCC did not bite at my argument that the unlawfulness of the expenditure must be viewed in the context of the total and complete hostility of the school district to offer me the mere humble opportunity to hand out a simple one page flier to the folks that they were paying to listen to PAT.

At the state level the legislators must fully and completely separate all PERS related “employer contributions” for past employment from the the current budget for education. Currently, the 5 billion dollars goes to the Oregon Department of Education where the state skims off vast chunks of the so-called education budget, to give directly to PERS, before forwarding the remained on to the districts. The legislators must characterize as education funding only that amount of money that is actually forwarded on to the school districts. The only retirement related expenses that can reasonably be included in the actual school budget are those where each particular employee has their pay stubs note their individual contributions to retirement for the purposes of availing themselves of preferential tax treatment by the Internal Revenue Service.

A very simple question for the state legislature would be “How much of the so-called school budget goes straight to PERS rather than to the schools?” This should be followed up with the demand that the PERS “employer contribution” component must be expressly segmented out as a separate line item for the appropriations bills. Payment supplementation for past work is a wholly different matter than keeping schools open for the purposes of complying with the Oregon Constitutional demand to adequately fund education. This segmentation, and the scrutiny it involves, would serve to keep schools open and keep teachers, particularly the new younger ones, teaching.

It borders on accounting fraud to commingle the PERS post-employment supplementation money with the costs for education today. As the Oregonian has said before, the school districts are powerless, if not ignorant of, the present and future demands by the PERB -- so it seems only reasonable that the local school district allocation from the state should be completely and fully segmented from the PERS “employer contributions.”

I'm APE for APE -- Are you?