I'm resurrecting this thread... for no good reason, I guess. Just wanted to put my $0.02 in.
My mom is a teacher at our local high school. I graduated from said high school just this previous May. I also worked for the district during my senior year. Now - this high school is not nearly as poor as most of the ones around here. I live in Columbus, Ohio, and this high school is a "Career Center" - a consortium of 16 school districts. We thus get funding from all over the place. Even though we do, the school does not have a lot of excess money to spend. We keep the facilities nice and pay our teachers slightly more than what the average is for our area.
As for Social Security - when I joined the district as an employee, I spoke with the treasurer's office, and they informed me that I would not be paying into Social Security - I would instead be paying into the Public Employee's Retirement System. All of the school employees from my area (Fairfield & Franklin counties, Ohio) pay into PER instead of SS (at least that's what I have been told by the local treasurers).
High schools around mine have not been as fortunate with funding as mine has been. A high school that I transferred out of this past year lost a lot of funding, when the State of Ohio pulled a lot of promised funds. Teacher pay was cut for many teachers, and some positions had to be eliminated. Thus, many teachers are remaining in a school district, now with more students per class (i.e. more problems), more classes, and less pay.
I don't know about anywhere else in the nation, but most of the teachers around here are very much underpaid. There are some school districts here that have more money than they need, and their teachers are paid accordingly... but the great majority of them are not in that situation. Even my high school, which has more funding than most, is not able to pay our teachers a wage that most would believe is fair for their duties.
My mom? Let's see. She works all of the normal 'school days' - a few over 180. Christmas break... this year, she took off about 5 days, instead of the allotted 10. She went in to work, graded papers, tutored students, etc. Summer 'vacation'... in addition to tending to her 2 elderly and disabled parents, mom is also taking college classes online, because they are required to renew her teaching certification. Spring break was spent studying for other certifications. Thanksgiving break she did take - simply because she was exhausted, and tired of continual work.
The hours? Official hours of business at the school are 7:30 AM - 3:00 PM. This past year, mom and I typically arrived at the school approximately 7:15 AM. It was not uncommon for us to leave at 5:00 PM - sometimes as late as 7:00 PM. There is a LOT more work that teachers could be doing to help their students... my mom tries her hardest to help every student to the best of her ability.
Although not directly teachers, some other district employees are also underpaid. The computer and network administration team, for example. That's the team I was on this past year - the average salary among us was $24,000 for full-time work. We had a team of 3 full time members, and I was the only part time member. In addition to just the computer networks, though, we were called upon for many other responsibilities. In the past year alone, we went from out-sourcing the management of our coax system, telephone system, and paging system to in house work by the same computer admin team. When I left the district, at the time of my graduation, they did hire another full time employee, thankfully. We were swamped, though, still! It was not uncommon for me to work 7:30 AM - 10:00 PM some days. A lot of my work was volunteer, simply because I couldn't get things done 'on the clock', even though they *needed* to be done immediately. Little things, like re-programming the phone system, after it suffered from a fatal crash. Getting the servers back online, after a corruption error, or other things that most people don't see as being immediately necessary, even though they are. I guarantee, had I gone home just one night, instead of stayed at work and completed whatever the job of the day was, then I would have been begged to come in early and take care of it. (No, Brad, I didn't know that the FCC building servers were down... What's that? The Norstar system is down? It can wait. How often do they need the phones, anyway?)
Enough of my rambling.
