Teachers paid for doing nothing

June 23, 2009 – 3:00 pm – No Comment

It is really nice to see tax payer dollars go toward paying teachers to do nothing. I’m not talking about the gym teacher either; I’m talking about “time out” for teachers.

Hundreds of New York City school teachers that have been accused of offenses are still on the clock; being paid their full salaries just to do nothing. As long as they’re not at home, they’re being paid. Many of the teachers sit around and surf the internet or play scrabble, whatever they want to do.

The union they work for’s contract makes it next to impossible to fire them, so the teachers are sent to “rubber rooms” which is a slang term for the off campus space where they can wait months or even years until disciplinary hearings.

Just like their colleagues who are actually teaching students at school, the nearly 700 teachers sitting in the rubber rooms still get summer vacation, weekends off, and holidays off throughout the school year.

The teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 a year, costing taxpayers somewhere in the ballpark of $65 million a year.

“No one wants teachers who don’t belong in the classroom. However, we cannot neglect the teachers’ rights to due process,” said Ron Davis, a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers. Currently the union is trying to work with the Department of Education to reach an agreement to reduce the amount of time teachers spend in the rubber rooms. The current union contract requires that the teachers continue their jobs in some way until their cases are tried.

So, while your children’s schools don’t have the funds to pay for copies of notes from the teacher, or every time you have to buy something that was once supplied by the school, like tissues or glue sticks, remember where your tax payer dollars are going.

Like most of the rest of the country, there is no teachers’ union to this extent where I live. This is probably for the best because even though I don’t have kids, if I knew that bit of my taxes was going to pay teachers to sit in a room and surf the internet or play scrabble I would be sitting in those rubber rooms on a daily basis and making them teach me or something.

This is as absurd as the union contract that required GM employees to have places for laid off or retired employees to stay for months and still receive their full salaries. I know that our public school system is broken, and this story just proves it once and for all.