PINE BUSH – Are there too many teachers in the Pine Bush School District? Going by the potential cuts announced by Superintendant Phil Steinberg —56 full time teachers — the answer would seem to be 'yes.' In fact, over the last few years student enrollment in Pine Bush has dropped by about 300, while at the same time the district added teachers.

Carla McLaud and Jim McIntyre, President and former Vice-President of the Pine Bush Teachers Association, agree that mistakes were made. McIntyre says, "We developed a bad habit of just replacing anyone who retired. We were enabled in that bad habit by the increases in school aid from the state. Now, in hindsight, it's clear that we should have been looking more carefully at the situation in regards to replacing retirees."

McLaud says, "During that time Pine Bush had comparatively low expenditure per pupil costs. We were being efficient, even though we added those teachers."

Beyond that, however, there's a broader point that McLaud makes, which is important in understanding the Pine Bush School District. "To start a new program, or resurrect an old one, like bringing a foreign language to a younger grade, costs a big chunk of money. But adding a teacher here or there is much less expensive, and in this district, which has very little in the way of commercial rateable property to help pay the taxes, that has been the preferred way of doing things."

McIntyre adds, "If I can only afford the basics, then those are teachers. What delivers the product, which is education? Answer: teachers. This is not a wealthy district; it's not Monroe-Woodbury, which has Woodbury Commons to help pay for things — to see the difference, just visit Monroe-Woodbury High School! So we don't have a lot of extras, so we've hired teachers."

That may be why Pine Bush School District scores a little higher than other districts in terms of the proportion of costs devoted to staff — just a bit less than 80 percent here. But that also means that when the budget has to be slashed due to an $11 million gap between projected revenues and projected costs, teachers are going to be in the firing line.

Naturally enough, Carla McLaud isn't happy with that idea. "Proper cost savings should be accomplished by attrition first. That means retirements — because it's not right to hire someone one year and fire them the next."

On that score, McLaud did have some good news. "It is looking as if we will have more retirements than we first expected come June."

That's a win-win situation, because retiring teachers are better paid than the newcomers, and being hired and then discarded here in Pine Bush will severely impact young teachers' lives.

Beyond the cuts and this year's budget, there lurks the widely held feeling that our teachers are overpaid. What's unusual in the teachers' position is that they are employed by the community they work in, they are a big group, and as a result they are by far the biggest expense for the community. This can breed resentment, especially when taxpayers don't know the details.

Jim McIntyre pounces on this question. "What a lot of people don't understand is that Pine Bush gets a pretty good deal on its teachers. Over a 35 year teaching career, a teacher in Orange County will earn, cumulatively, anywhere between $2,337,000 at the best paid districts and less than $2,000,000 at the worst paid. Pine Bush? We come in at a bit above the $2,000,000 mark. Compared to the best paid, that's a saving of a quarter million dollars or more on every single teacher and we have 500 in the district. Do the math."

That's $125 million, an impressive figure, a bit more than $3.5 million a year.

"The reason it's like that is that Pine Bush has 26 'steps' [the increments that gradually increase teacher pay over their careers; negotiated salary increases are in addition to the steps].

"But some districts have just 13 or 15 steps. That means that teachers there rise more quickly to the higher salary levels and spend more years at those levels than we do in Pine Bush. That's a significant saving for the taxpayer."

McLaud voices another aspect of the situation. "I'm a taxpayer. All the teachers pay property taxes; even if they're renting their homes, they're contributing to the tax base in one school district or another. We see this from both sides, and everyone should understand that."

Another aspect of the relationship between teachers and districts is that the teachers are unionized and form a powerful negotiating unit. They have legally binding contracts with districts.

"Our contracts are collectively bargained for, then ratified by the membership," says McLaud. In other words they can't be undone, or even changed without being renegotiated and then ratified by that membership. Beyond that, the contracts between school districts and their unions are not on-off affairs, they are cumulative — the result of decades of bargains and agreements and that makes it even more difficult to undo them.

This is a point of difference with most Americans, who labor without union protections. Nor will this difference change anytime soon. Some of the same feelings come up in the debate over tenure, which gives teachers an unusual degree of job security in the American economy.

"Tenure is essential if you want to keep education from becoming politicized," says McIntyre. "Would we want teachers hired because they vote one way or another?" McLaud adds, "There are three years to evaluate a teacher before they get tenure. If they're not good enough, you're going to find out long before you give them that kind of job security."

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