I was president of our local for ten years and I hated the last two months of the school year.
That is when administrators made decisions
That is never a good thing.
Yesterday we got a memo from our Type 75 (who will not be back next year). She hasn’t done the required fire and tornado drills and so has to catch up.
We’re having two on Monday.
Rather than say she just made a mistake or do the smart thing and schedule them on different days, she explained the two drills on the same day as a plan to have the AM and PM kindergarteners have the “same experience.”
The same experience? Meaning the same day of the same week? This begs the question, “What if a fire breaks out on a Tuesday?”
Such are the decisions of Type 75s.
And speaking of the Governor.
At his presser yesterday he said he was born to solve the pension and Medicaid problems of the state.
Born to solve them.
It is reported that there were snickers from reporters at the press conference.
Of course some of these same reporters snicker at the idea that the solution to the problems with Medicaid and state pensions resides on the revenue side.
As Joe Pesci said, “How is this funny?”
Throwing thousands of poor folks off of medicaid. Cutting the pensions of retired seniors makes sense to these cynics. A progressive tax system and having corporations pay their share is funny to them.
The IEA and others are pushing for a graduated progressive tax system to replace the present flat tax, which taxes most those least able to pay.
To those like Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown, this is funny.
But taxing retired teachers, many who make less than $20,000 a year? That makes sense.
And the Governor says he was born to do it.
Fred Klonsky 
When the Civic Club attacked public pensions, we weren’t surprised. They have been attacking working men and women since 1870. Oppressing working people is their raison d’etre. The Tribune undermining teachers isn’t a new idea, either. Their editorials have been troublesome for decades. The innovation is to take their opinions and transfer them to the news pages in order to pretend that they are facts. When the Illinois General Assembly joined the mob crying for our hides, it was quite a shock. After all, this legislature was the kindly uncle who gave us every single benefit in our pension package. It turns out that they paid for it all with their credit card. Recently, the lynch mob is being led by our own executive director. Mr. Ingram has been quoted in news stories all over the state as favoring reductions of benefits, especially COLA, for those already retired.
The latest blow came in the form of a plan from a bipartisan committee established by Governor Quinn. He wants to give all active teachers and the other public employees a choice of which way they want to have their future benefits butchered. We thought it couldn’t get worse. And then we carefully considered his words and realized that the governor is only the tip of the iceberg. Governor Quinn believes that he was placed on this earth to solve the pension problems in Illinois. But he wasn’t speaking in a secular sense. Evolution can not explain how his physical characteristics make him better suited to solve a pension problem than the rest of us mere mortals.
Nor could the governor have been speaking of his parents’ decision to expand their family 65 years ago. Ma and Pa Quinn did not say, “We’ve got an extra bedroom, so let’s bring a little Quinn into the world to solve the pension problems that the Illinois General Assembly hasn’t created yet.” If neither evolution nor his parents ordained that he was placed on the earth to solve the pension problem, who did? It’s obvious that the governor believes that God must have sent him to earth with this mission in mind.
The governor is wrong. He says that this plan will save the state of Illinois at least 65 billion dollars by 2045. The plan would extract much of the savings from the public employees. But God knows that the state of Illinois, through its legislature, caused these problems. God would not favor a plan which further victimizes the victims. But the plan now backed by Governor Quinn gives to active teachers and other public employees an offer they can’t refuse. That offer wasn’t inspired by God. It was inspired by the Godfather.
Now we offer the governor a choice. He may
a) Take his pension plan, place it right side up, and shove it.
or
b) Take his pension plan, turn it upside down, and then shove it.