Minimum Wage Schools Coming.

What's going on here, I thought when Scott Walker gave school districts the tools to balance their budgets...that funding problems would be a thing of the past. Instead, it was a license to destroy family incomes and turn schools into minimum wage jobs. 

Sheboygan Press: Tanya Behnke received a standing ovation from the packed house at Tuesday night's School Board meeting, and she was one of several support staff employees who spoke during the public comment portion the meeting against … Sheboygan School Board that a proposed 100 percent hike to insurance premiums for support staff 

Walker’s tools essentially gave districts a pass to save money through never ending insurance and pension increases (not to mention school closings).

The increase would require employees to contribute 24.5 percent of their premiums. Currently, employees contribute 12 percent in accordance with the state law signed last year by Gov. Scott Walker, which for support staff equals about $206 per month. Last year at this time, however, support staff employees were paying 5 percent, or $82 per month. The jump to 24.5 percent would increase the premiums to between $373 and $400 per month.

Tell me this sounds like we're headed in the right direction:

Tanya Behnke struggled to hold back tears as she explained to the board that a proposed 100 percent hike to insurance premiums for support staff would devastate her household. Behnke, an educational assistant at the Early Learning Center, said she's a single parent who supports her two children on less than $17,000 and she implored the board to "think about that bottom line."

Imagine if we had a single payer system and employers and employees didn’t have to go through this trauma every year. And with lower wages, comes the need by some for a second job:

WEAU:  Wisconsin educators were catapulted into the spotlight last year with the passage of Governor Walker's Act 10 which forced all public employees to contribute more to their health and retirement plans. The act resulted in about a 10 percent cut in pay, which teachers say forced many of them into second jobs just to make ends meet.

Chippewa Falls physical education teacher Mary Baldeshwiler “spent my first three summers in grad school, working on my masters and getting my adaptive physical education license.” And every few years Mary says teachers are required to get additional credits to maintain their teaching license and that can cost thousands of dollars, and has to be done over the summer.

So what is all this extra work and added stress doing to our teachers, and most importantly our children? “If people are having to take supplemental jobs to make ends meet, they are not then able to put that time into lessons, put that time into tutoring or helping students, I just don't think it's ideal,” Eau Claire Association of Educators President Ron Duff Martin tells us. “When I began I was taught to teach the whole child, teach the curriculum, the content. Well today we're told to do so much more, we're told to be surrogate parents, surrogate social workers, we're asked to be a little bit of everything and I think that's harder for teachers,” Martin tells us.