Buffalo Rising Online

Good for Hernandez. He did the repsonsible thing, and I hope he stands his ground at next week's meeting where according to tbe Buffalo News the appeal might have to be authorized again but another member who voted for the appeal will be absent.

I won't claim to know what the right court decisions should be, but the appeal should be made if for no other reason than to establish the official definition of wage freeze once and for all so both sides know what it is.

If the city loses appeal, then consequences will be dealt with and the Control Board might have to restart the wage freeze and this time realize they can't remove it until enough reserve is built up to pay step raises. Really this uncertainty seems fault of the state legislators who wrote the control board law. Rules for step raises should've been clear in what the legislature passed, not punted down the road for judges to decide and taxpayers to pay lawyers to fight about.

But just to walk away from appeal at this point won't accomplish anything. The budget gaps and animosity will be here for years to come. Making any progress will require having the rules fully known by both sides.

If BTF had lost previous court ruling they would've filed an appeal already no questions asked, so it's typical B.S. of them to now whine against the Board appealing. OTOH, the union funded campaigns of many board members so probably they feel they have the right to make demands on them

your right...the Buffalo Teachers Federation doesnt hesitate to appeal until they win and the School Board and the School Superintendent must have the same backbone for the sake of the school, for the sake of the city, for the sake of the kids and for the sake of the taxpayer

Gone are the days when the unions can just make demands and it gets legislated to the taxpayer as an increase instead of dealing with the job of management.

Yeah, even if they lose appeal they'd be no worse off and it's worth legal fees at this point in exchange for pretty good certainty before next steps about layoffs, negotiations, control baord doing re-freeze, whatever. And there's some chance they win appeal, who knows, and then their bargaining position would instantly improve.

Can't even think of one legit argument for not appealing, unless BTF suddenly proposes some serious long term give-back plan. Pretty unlikely to say the least.

look the Buffalo Public School System has no credibility with the taxpayer and the city government because it repeatedly get run over by the unions

the unions win lawsuits

the unions win arbitration

the unions stack the school board

and it never ends...so I say layoff the 600 teachers and close a grammer school and high school. Send the kids to charter and parochial schools....but for the love of pete ... dont expect the taxpayer to make up for the lack of backbone of the superintendent and school board.

isnt that the truth.... There is a male teacher in the Buffalo Public School Systems close to retirement age and to listen to him talk he is running the school while the principle takes a day off, he is setting educational policy and complaining about kids and parents.....in other words....he is doing everything but teaching

He also managed to get one of his friends a job as something like a teachers aid or secretary to the principle or something like that and she uses her computer for personal projects, makes and receives personal phones constantly thru the day and doesnt even need to show up to get paid..because as she says the principle likes her.

Well, with crap like this...is it any wonder why both the unions and the school boards always turn to the taxpayer for more money. Who wouldnt love a teaching job that one doesnt have to teach and who wouldnt love an administrative job where one doesnt have to show up...and if one does....they can work on personal projects rather than professional. Youd think that this was the 1960s that a principle cant type on a computer himself and still needs a secretary for dictation...thats how bad public schools are...

Public schools....ITS LIKE DESCRIBING THE MORBIDLY OBESE AS ANOREXIC.

I say let the taxpayers close a few schools....let schoools compete with charters, parochial and private schools via choice and vouchers and end all this non-sense. Hey your kids cant get jobs here and school taxes are just one of the taxes that are the highest in the nation acting as an incentive for an employer to bypass us but hire our kids elsewhere.

for Chris69: while I don't condone using work time for personal projects, I'm sure you've never heard of white-collar people using their computers for personal projects (online shopping, chat?) or their phones for personal calls? Most teachers I know don't have phones in their rooms nor do they have any time for non-school related projects. You heard about an exception, not the rule, and that happens EVERYWHERE people work.

I was pleased to see that actual teachers responded to this post. It takes a lot of courage for them to speak publicly. In most cases, when a teacher writes in a forum such as this (or especially a letter to the editor in a newspaper), it is an open invitation for those outside the profession to respond with those negative stereotypical grievances reflected in some of the posts here. I applaud those teachers who took the risk to comment. As a retired teacher who has no stake in this particular dilemma, I feel I must add my support. From what I read, there is precious little here.

It is obvious that the general public has no real idea what really goes on in public schools or the challenges teachers and students face. Nor do they know of the vast preponderous of dedicated professionals that comprise this field. I like the comment that people who abuse their time and position can be found in any industry. In more than 30 years of my experience, I have rarely encountered such teachers of this ilk. Rarely. Counter to the misconception that teachers can't be fired, there really are ways to "encourage" these people to leave.

Poverty and funding are the issues here. I have worked in both urban and suburban school districts. Poverty makes a HUGE difference in teacher effectiveness and student learning. To say that Buffalo has no shortage of poverty would be a gross understatement. The students bring all the concommitant issues (not enumerated here) to school with them.

Taxes are frequently mentioned as the major concern and this aspect of public attacks on the schools is a valid one in NYS. They are outrageous. Several states have radically changed the way school are funded. They have restructured the way taxes are collected and distributed. In these states, the pot is divided into per pupil allotments which essentially means that each district, regardless of wealth, receives the exact number of dollars per student as the next. This eliminates the inequities guaranteeing that children of poverty get the same monies as the wealthy.

Buffalo schools will continue to be underfunded under the current system. Without some intervention,the spiral effect persist. Public education is so very extremely important to parents that it will continue to keep middle class families out of the city further exacerbating the decline. Yes, you can't get blood from a stone. And, you can't give teachers serving in difficult environments combat pay. Teachers in Buffalo should be thanked for working under intolerable conditions basically subsidizing the citizens by their personal and financial sacrifice.

All the dicscussion about unions, laziness, summers off ad infinitum is extraneous and undeserved. These teachers are not parasites greedily feasting on the heavily burdened taxpayers of Buffalo. I applaud them.

Attacks welcome! The more irrelevant, ignorant and fallacious the better.

The thing is, public employee contracts don't stand by themselves and never have. They're always in the context of a big bunch of state labor laws, and this is well understood by both sides.

Often times over the years these laws have worked to the advantange of the BTF and other unions in various ways when they've won court rulings. This time it might possibly work against the BTF if a higher court rules the legally binding legislature-authorized wage freeze applies to the salary step increases. Or it's also possible the higher court rules how the BTF wants.

I don't have a legal opinion either way and am not qualified to interpret those laws. Seems to me the legislature could and should have made this clear in how the control board law was written instead of leaving the step increase aspect up to the courts. The law did authorize wage freezes and courts have upheld legality of those, even though one could argue those are inconsistent with contracts as well. But the law didn't say one way or another whether the freeze applies to step increases, so now the court process should clear that up. As mentioned earlier, there's no doubt the BTF would be appealing if the initial ruling had gone against them.

Larger issues people have commented here are interesting and deserve consideration from the governor and legislature where those decisions are made. But the Board of Ed isn't in a position to make big changes in how education is funded or organized. They were elected to deal with the amount of funding they have in as responsible a way as they can. If the appeal favors the BTF (or if BTF-supporting Board members block the appeal) it seems that will result in a lot of layoffs and cutbacks.