Greed: First DeForest Administrators; Now Milwaukee Teachers

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From the people that demanded their Viagra at a cost to the taxpayers of $1M, now comes a refusal to capitulate to what most other teachers' unions have already accepted.  The cost?  The jobs of as many as 354 of their own.  Yes, Virginia...Milwaukee teachers apparently do eat their own.

Education Action Group: Milwaukee school board and teachers union – not the state – to blame for 354 teacher layoffs

Seven months after painting itself into a financial corner, Milwaukee Public Schools did the inevitable yesterday and laid off 354 teachers and 165 staff members.
    The layoffs come after teachers union members made it abundantly clear they had no interest in helping alleviate the district’s financial woes by agreeing to contribute 5.8 percent to their own pension plans, a move that would have allowed 200 teachers to remain employed, according to CNN.
    “We are not willing to negotiate,” MTEA President Mike Langyel recently told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “We have concluded bargaining. We are willing to work with the school board to get proper funding from Madison.”
    Translation: We got ours, so tough luck to the students as well as the younger teachers who will lose their jobs.
    In addition to the huge number of teacher layoffs, MPS said that students will have to make do with old textbooks and larger class sizes. We’ll wager that students will also have fewer academic offerings from which to choose.

Certainly, the school board was foolish to offer a 4-year contract when the smell of wholesale change was wafting through the air.  No one was offering lengthy contracts.  But now is the time to sacrifice for others, to protect your brethren.  We wonder how interested these young teachers, who lost their jobs, will be in maintaining their union status.  Walker may have delivered a crushing blow to unions, but the old guard of MTEA have themselves delivered what may be a finishing blow to the union.  Remember, folks...Walker's law requires unions to re-certify annually...or be gone.

 Yes...things are tough.  NO ONE wanted to accept these cuts disguised as  increased payroll deductions. Our own Sun Prairie teachers didn't like it either.  But they accepted their Governor Walker imposed fate and took the high road.  Our teachers understand that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.  They understand that Walker has his way...for now anyway.