The Observation Deck

Donald Farris wrote:Hi,


Regardless, the fact the number of enrolled students has decreased in the past by 20% should result in reduced costs to the school system. Actual decreases in enrollment reduce actual costs of operation.

In addition to what Mr Rice offered, I will add these points.

1. Basic math. If you have 100 teachers making $30,000 a year, your cost is $300,000. If you need 10 less teachers, that knocks your cost down to $270,000. But if the 90 remaining teachers get a 3% annual raise, your back up to $300,000 or close to it. This is where Lakewood schools are. There have been reductions in force every year for the last 10 yrs. and older teachers have been bought out and replaced by younger ones on the lower end of the spectrum.d

2. Lakewood itself. We have 10 schools. Other districdts with more students have half that. We could chop costs by getting down to 5 or 6 schools and buying a fleet of buses. Are you on board with that?
3. The big controversy this year was that parents were crying and screaming because their kids were in classes of 20 and not 17! The school board and administration is NOT your adversary here. I take it your children are grown. Train your guns on todays parents.
4. Mr Rice is right. We love to "celebrate" Lakewood but every kid who lands here from Albanian or Pakistan is required to be educated and the fed bovt pays 20 cents on the dolar.
I did not get an answer to the question I asked in a previous post. Have you not raised your prices or rents in the last 7 years?

Dee Martinez wrote:You can check out the 5 year forecast here:
http://fyf.oecn.k12.oh.us/genForecast.a ... ormat=HTML

This shows Lakewood paying $44 mil in the current fiscal year to $49 mil in 2012, about 12 percent (or 3 percent a yr) A 20% increase would take it to $52 mil.
Districts cannot presume decreases in enrollment. They have to figure on enrollment being stable at current levels.
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Over the entire period the amount paid for salaries and benefits will increase 20%. The goal should be a budget that keeps salaries and benefits at there current rates for the next five years. There are reasonable ways to do that but the union will not permit it.

The tax levels needed to fund the demands of the government unions are strangling this City and this region. And that is before factoring in the $40 billion under funding of State and local pensions.

Hi,
Ms. Martinez, it sounds like we agree thanks to declining enrollment the schools have been able to reduce costs while maintaining or reducing the student to teacher ration. Additionally, our new schools are/should operate (and I assume do) at less cost than the old ones. This, plus the reduction in number of schools, allowed the current tax levels to fund operating our schools.

Regarding your other question, we have not raised our rates to customers since before 2000. In fact we are offering a 10% on our services to Lakewood businesses during this economic crisis. NE Ohio is hurting. I might add that our costs (mainly health care) has risen significantly. We have been forced to increase co-pays to our employees, as have most businesses.

I have not suggested further reduction in schools or bussing our kids. Please do not attempt to put words in my mouth.

Hi,
With all the features the deck provides, they are still unable to give us an Edit button. So let me clarify my last post.

I said:

" In fact we are offering a 10% on our services to Lakewood businesses during this economic crisis."

I meant:
In fact we are offering a 10% discount on our services to Lakewood businesses during this economic crisis.

Sorry I missed that.

Bill Call wrote:

Dee Martinez wrote:You can check out the 5 year forecast here:
http://fyf.oecn.k12.oh.us/genForecast.a ... ormat=HTML

This shows Lakewood paying $44 mil in the current fiscal year to $49 mil in 2012, about 12 percent (or 3 percent a yr) A 20% increase would take it to $52 mil.
Districts cannot presume decreases in enrollment. They have to figure on enrollment being stable at current levels.
[/url]

Over the entire period the amount paid for salaries and benefits will increase 20%. The goal should be a budget that keeps salaries and benefits at there current rates for the next five years. There are reasonable ways to do that but the union will not permit it.

The tax levels needed to fund the demands of the government unions are strangling this City and this region. And that is before factoring in the $40 billion under funding of State and local pensions.

No Mr. Call, the goal is NOT a budget that keeps salaries and benefits at their current rates for the next five yrs.

The goal is to provide a quality education for our children, and that may involve taking a little bit more out of your pocket.
But nobody said life was perfect.

Dee Martinez wrote:No Mr. Call, the goal is NOT a budget that keeps salaries and benefits at their current rates for the next five yrs.

The goal is to provide a quality education for our children, and that may involve taking a little bit more out of your pocket.
But nobody said life was perfect.

Our business hasn't raised labor rates in three or four years and in some cases for some customer a lot longer than that. We have been asked for 25% reductions in contract prices for some of our biggest customers. That's life.

I suppose it's good strategy to argue that asking for salary reductions and shared benefit costs are anti teacher but that is not the case. If salaries and benefits are frozen the average teacher in Lakewood will still make $80,000 in pay and benefits per year. If those rates were reduced by 10% then the average would be $72,000.The people of Lakewood are being very generous.

I've voted for every levy for the last 30 years but I'm probably not going to vote for any more. I'm tapped out.

Think of the large education bureaucracy as GMC and the teachers unions as the UAW. Small steps taken early can negate the need for large changes later on. It's later than you think.

All I am going to say is hahaha classes of 17 or 20 are unheard of at most Lakewood schools and we certainly don't have small class sizes at my kids school. Hell my first grader is in a class of 30 and I will gladly pay his teacher more as she has an extremely tough job and is doing an amazing job. If interested I have a break down of class sizes for every elementary class in the district.

In the long history of education, I think that there has been a perpetual tension between academia and the business world.

Having been in both quarters at different points in my life, I think that I understand why.

It's not that either camp is completely wrong or right.

Both make good points from time to time.

These are not the only two dynamics in play either, regarding the public educational question; as has been discussed.

Bottom line to me? Business wants trainable, team-oriented people coming out of schools who are literate in basic math and grammar skills. They want to see measurable outcomes documented, as that is what they are forced to deal with every day; only theirs is often and quite literally, the bottom line for their operations. Educators want all that too, but they want to cultivate a spirit of inquiry, as well as offering classes in a variety of disciplines. They also understand that children learn in different ways and require flexibility at times. Businesses don't seem to care much for the term "flexibility" in their all-too-often stark choices world.

Business wants the most outcome for the least possible dollar. That's why so often, they seem to continue to push for non-union shops and continual cutting of benefits and wages. Educators, on the other hand, have to work at wages that are pitiful for probably 20 years out of a 30 year career. They need some trade-off for that sacrifice, and that comes in retirement and other benefit packages attained through collective bargaining with association representation.

So is this always an oil-and-water discussion? Not necessarily. It simply represents one more dynamic in the public education discussion...only this particular dynamic has been going on since public education began, and since laws requiring school attendance took children out of the sweatshops and gave them schoolbooks.

If you think that business does indeed have the "right' model with their oftentimes survival-of-the-fittest thinking, then ask yourself this....

When businesses left the union-shop big cities and went South and West, did that satisfy them? Or, when that wasn't enough, did they take their production overseas for even cheaper labor?

Think of all of the industries that were here, even when I was a lad...

Shoes, television and radio, cameras, appliances, musical instruments, tools, steel, iron....I could go on and on.....

Gone, for the most part....

I think that business, by it's very nature, looks out for business.

Education, on the other hand, looks out for your children.

And that's the difference to me.

Bill,
I remember reading on another thread that teachers in Lakewood average $60,000 so which figure is it and where do you verify the figures? I just received information on all school districts in the county and even though the figures are from a few years ago, they say much has not changed-Lakewood was in the bottom seven for starting salaries for teachers so I am curious where you verify your figures.

Justine Cooper wrote:Bill,
I remember reading on another thread that teachers in Lakewood average $60,000 so which figure is it and where do you verify the figures? I just received information on all school districts in the county and even though the figures are from a few years ago, they say much has not changed-Lakewood was in the bottom seven for starting salaries for teachers so I am curious where you verify your figures.

If you think teachers are overpaid people in cushy jobs, tehres not much anyone can do to change your mind.
However if you look at the figures Lakewood is basically paying the "going rate" for teachers in Cuyahoga Co.
The idea of forcing a 10% salary cut on teachers is ludicrous. Teachers strikes split communities right down the middle, You will lose the battle AND lose the war all to save $20 a month.
Its silly to even talk about.

[quote="Dee Martinez"]

1. Basic math. If you have 100 teachers making $30,000 a year, your cost is $300,000. If you need 10 less teachers, that knocks your cost down to $270,000. But if the 90 remaining teachers get a 3% annual raise, your back up to $300,000 or close to it. This is where Lakewood schools are. There have been reductions in force every year for the last 10 yrs. and older teachers have been bought out and replaced by younger ones on the lower end of the spectrum.d

2. Lakewood itself. We have 10 schools. Other districdts with more students have half that. We could chop costs by getting down to 5 or 6 schools and buying a fleet of buses. Are you on board with that?
3. The big controversy this year was that parents were crying and screaming because their kids were in classes of 20 and not 17! The school board and administration is NOT your adversary here. I take it your children are grown. Train your guns on todays parents.
4. Mr Rice is right. We love to "celebrate" Lakewood but every kid who lands here from Albanian or Pakistan is required to be educated and the fed bovt pays 20 cents on the dolar.
I did not get an answer to the question I asked in a previous post. Have you not raised your prices or rents in the last 7 years?[/quote]


Since Lakewood has a relatively young corps of teachers, and because an individual teacher's salary goes up as they acrue experience and education, I think Mr. Call is not unreasonable in thinking that the pay of individual teachers will increase more than the annual increase written into the contract, and who can say that his figure of 20 percent is unreasonable, given that information as to the salary scale and what can cause pay to increase is a closely guarded secret.

However, to argue that if you pay 100 teachers $30,000 each, your payroll is $300,000 per year is not basic math; it is delusional math. I think high school graduates should realize that the payroll would actually be $3 mission dollars, but then the schools don't seem to do well in teaching math. But wait, it gets better. If you lop off 10 of those teachers you have 90 left, and 90 teachers at $30,000 per year is, in the real world, $2.7 million dollars, not $270,000. And if you give each of those 90 teachers a 3% raise, you don't return to your original payroll of $300, 000 (in fact, $3 million) but rather to about $2.8 million dollars (or $280,000 delusional).

So much for credibility.

As to the burden of having immigrants in our city, that is a situation that has existed for years. Lakewood has been a city where immigrants moved as soon as they could afford to get out of Cleveland, and where they worked and prospered hoping that they could move on to a more roomy suburb, and their contribution to this city, indeed, to this nation, has been substantial and positive. I think it is the height of hypocrisy for someone who is an immigrant themself, or a descendant of immigrants, which would include all of us, turns up his nose at the new immigrants, who continue to contribute to our society.

As to teacher's pay, I think there are two situations involved at this time. The first is our current economic difficulty. And my feeling with regard to that is that when so many workers in all fields are facing wage cuts and job loss, I don't see why government workers (such as teachers) and politicians should be exempted. I'm not saying that teachers are overpaid; I'm saying that they should not be exempted from the economic pain that is hitting everyone else. I don't think we would lose many, if any, teachers as we shared the pain; where would they go?

As to the second situation, I think the cost of education could be decreased by instituting some efficiencies, a concept that the teachers and administration, including the Board, seem to resist at all costs. What I'm saying is that if you followed a teacher around for a few schooldays, you would find them doing a lot of things that are similar to babysitting and clerking, that do not warrant their relatively high pay. If we could have a lesser paid employee, or even a machine, do those non-teaching tasks, we could have the teachers do more teaching, and thus get more educating for out tax dollars. Now, realistically, if the number of students remained the same, or decreased, that would lead to a reduction in the number of teachers (as it does under the current inefficient system), but we have schools to educate our students, not to provide jobs for teachers.

First of all, lets get a few things straight here....

Wherever this attribution to me came from:

"4. Mr Rice is right. We love to "celebrate" Lakewood but every kid who lands here from Albanian or Pakistan is required to be educated and the fed bovt pays 20 cents on the dolar."

It DID NOT come from me in any way, ever, ever, ever.

Nor do I find the spelling to be particularly amusing.

I understand that the written word gets twisted and mangled all the time, but Mr. Rice (me)said and/or wrote NOTHING about the above topic EVER.

My entire life has been dedicated to teaching anyone who has EVER walked into my classroom, from WHEREVER they came from.

PARTICULARLY children coming from difficult circumstances. As a Special Education teacher (retired) I have a special affinity for any child facing any sort of unusual challenge.

SO PLEASE DO NOT ATTRIBUTE THINGS TO ME THAT I HAVE NOT HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH.

I think that they may refer to that as LIBEL, in legal terms.

Dad and I have just spent the better part of two days as retired volunteer teachers, assisting Harding, Garfield's, and Lakewood High School's music programs. The regular teachers work long, and many times, after hours helping their students to achieve and interact with the community. Last night, Harding students entertained Lakewood residents with a jazz extravaganza interacting with a senior professional jazz group (TOPS) in an educational seminar. Today, Garfield and high school students and their conductors performed after-hours for Lakewood Seniors, coordinating with H20 and the Office on Aging for a magic evening.

In other areas Lakewood teachers work hard to continually raise the bar for academic excellence throughout the district. Lakewood does indeed have a diverse population of many immigrants as well as serving a wide variety of students. New arrivals take special classes to improve their English skills. Special needs students are provided with a wide array of services, and each and every day that I am in a Lakewood school building, I am continually pleased to see just how well all of this comes together.

I would invite anyone who would like to find out more about a teacher's life to visit the Lakewood schools for a day. They are, after all, your schools, and they are very, very good indeed, for all of our students.

Gary Rice wrote:I would invite anyone who would like to find out more about a teacher's life to visit the Lakewood schools for a day. They are, after all, your schools, and they are very, very good indeed, for all of our students.

http://www.lakewoodobserver.com/forum/v ... php?t=7930

Mr Rice.

Pls let me clarify the comment which I admit came from me and may have been clumsily worded,
I believe you have indeed "celebrated" Lakewoods diversity in many posts.
I did not mean to imply that at any point you complained about the cost or burden of educating children from other countries.

I have a hunch you would agree with me that Lakewood is very special, but the "specialness" comes with a price tag that not everyone appreciates.

And to Mr Brown

Play all the games you want with numbers. The fact remains that the cost of everything has gone up in the last seven years EXCEPT the price of educating Lakewood kids.