Listener Feedback: The Impact of Double Dippers

NewsNM note- Sometimes a listener will write to us and provide a unique perspective worth sharing. This piece came from NewsNM listener Charles Galt - As a former math teacher with an average student roster of 170+ students per year, it is staggering to me that the Albuquerque Public Schools allows employees to take paid leave of up to 100 days or more (only 182 days to begin with) per year. This is at the least is unfair and ethically repugnant. The education lobby is continually hiding behind "its for our future, it is all about the kids," but this hyprocrisy is blatant. The state pays a public employee for work not rendered and then gives compensation in another realm while the students and/or other employees are left holding the bag. The state then pays another person to do the job of the double dipper by hiring a "substitute." The substitute then follows a guide supposedly constructed by the absentee teacher and offers instruction of an inconsistent albeit not necessarily inferior nature. So the state (taxpayer) pays two people for a job done in a less than agreed upon fashion.

I doubt that the average parent would like to have their child taught half the time by a person not giving 100% of their attention and effort particularly in the areas where schools are being graded by a test that looks only at math and language arts. It saddens me to think that the school system in a state that typically ranks in the bottom 5% of Math and Language Arts skills can pay teachers for not doing their job 100%.

A doctor, or rancher, or farmer, or lawyer that becomes a legislator gives up their practice or their responsibilities that constitute their duty to a career and is not paid by the taxpayer for those days and that attention to client or business responsibilities. Why are teachers, administrators or any public employee treated as a more favored class of citizens. So much for CHARACTER COUNTS, so much for the rock ribbed tenets of citizenship, fairness, truthfulness and so on. That program, Character Counts, is paid only lip service while property owners, productive citizens,students, parents and society in general pay for all of the sycophantic pedagogues and those that sustain this corrupt system. If  "hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue" then at the least the good citizens and honest legislators should not allow anyone to get paid for a job they do not do. I am disgusted.

Listener Feedback: The Impact of Double Dippers