News
S.C. teachers object to furlough proposal
January 28, 2010
S.C. teachers object to furlough proposal
By Ron Barnett
Staff writer
A proposal to furlough teachers for five days to help make up a $563 million state budget shortfall would likely hurt morale but not have a big impact on students, some educators say.
“For me personally, it would be tough financially to do that because I’m a single parent and it’s my source of income,” said Ellen Mash, a kindergarten assistant at River Ridge Elementary in Spartanburg District 5.
“But I understand what they have to do,” she said. “I guess if I really wanted to do something to make more money, I would have chosen a different profession.”
A House subcommittee has given initial approval to a proposal for teachers statewide to take five days off without pay – days they would have been doing such things as training sessions and wouldn’t have been teaching anyway.
The proposal also calls for administrators to take 10 days of furlough. Together, that would save about $100 million.
Mash said she normally would use the five days to catch up on paperwork – which she’d still have to do.
“We’d still have to do the same amount of work. We’d just have less time to do it,” she said.
Most teachers would probably come to school on the days they are furloughed and work without pay, said Grier Mullins, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, a nonprofit organization that supports public education in Greenville County.
“Teachers usually do whatever they have to do get the job done,” she said. “I think the biggest impact will be teacher morale will suffer.”
Jim Foster, spokesman for the state Department of Education, also said the measure would hurt teacher morale and sends the wrong message to college students considering going into the profession.
“Any way you dress it up, a furlough is a pay cut, so you're talking about a one-week pay cut for teachers and a two-week pay cut for everybody else,” he said.
“And this would come on top of the unpaid leave that a lot of these folks already have taken,” and on top of $700 million in budget cuts to their schools over the past 18 months.
The Greenville County School District has avoided furloughs but left vacant positions unfilled and cut back on spending for classroom materials and other expenses.
The Legislature last year allowed districts to furlough teachers up to five non-teaching days, for the current school year.
Under the new proposal, districts would be able to decide which days to put teachers on furlough.
The proposal, which now goes to the House Ways and Means Committee, also calls for suspending tests that aren’t required by the federal government, which would save about $3 million.
