Educational Budget

Regarding the dire and desperate state of our financial educational budget, as a concerned citizen I suggest the following:

1. All teachers to be willing to take a 1 percent pay cut.

2. All administrators to be willing to take a 2 percent pay cut (however, the salaries of support staff such as bus drivers and cafeteria workers should not be cut as has been proposed.)

3. All administrative positions to be capped as $80,000. One principal salary, now at $110,000, if capped at $80,000, would save one new teacher from getting the axe. It has been decades of inequitable across the board raises that has brought us to having such a wide gap in salaries between professional classroom teachers and the administrative support staff.

4. Another paramount decision of wisdom is that school board positions go back to what they used to be, that is, voluntary positions. Three decades ago, a loophole was noticed and in county after county, school board members began voting themselves their first salary. The rational was that it was for such tings as gas and baby sitting costs. This should have been a stipend, but since the original salary was such a pittance, nothing was done to correct that school board option, of voting one's self a raise.

School board members meet a few times a month and most hold full time jobs. So what has happened over the last three decades with the option of school board members having the freedom to vote themselves a raise? Now each school board member collects a salary close to what a beginning professional teacher makes! Returning that position to one of voluntary community service would save approximately five new teacher units.

I trust that we in Highlands County will have the good sense in this financially desperate turn of events to remember that it is the teacher in the classroom who is the beating heart of education. The wise surgeon is not going to take a scalpel to the heart when trying to save the system. As well, wise leadership in our county will serve to inspire leadership in other counties throughout our state.

Asa Jackson Peck
Sebring