My teachers are striking.

I apologize if people feel this is a waste of space...this is the first thread I've started here but I have some complaints and some questions.

In my local township, our public school teachers are preparing to strike. Obviously, we, as students, are furious at the prospect of losing our holidays and summer to the greed of our teachers. But it becomes far worse when we look at the numbers.

Best I can tell (from general googling), the average national teachers salary is about $45,000. We live in a very affluent community, with some of the best schools in the state of PA. The MINIMUM starting salary, yes starting salary, at our school is roughly $50,000. Meaning, a first year teacher can walk into our district and make more than the national average of all teachers in the country, regardless of experience. The MAXIMUM salary for a teacher -cash compensation- is just under $100,000 a year. This does not include benefits, andd while I don't have a number for those, it would be at least enough to put that number well into six figures. Needless to say, the teachers in our district are far from deprived.

I've had several of the head union reps as teachers, and I can attest to the fact that many of them are extreme leftists. I generally don't hold it too much against them. Except now, their greed and selfishness is interfering with everybody else's lives.

I have a couple questions. The first are legal, and really more out of my own curiousity than anything else. 1. Can teachers on strike be fired? At the levels we pay these people, we could have those positions filled again overnight. If I were the superintendent, I would have said "show up for work tomorrow, or you're fired". Is that legally possible? 2. are there such things as illegitimate grounds for a strike? I think it would be tough to make a case that a teacher making a hundred grand really has grounds to strike. Is it possible for a judge to throw that out?

Lastly, I would just like some ideas as to how we as students could become involved in the process without damaging ourselves in school. Nobody is in favor of this, but the vast majority I've talked to are fearful of retribution by the teachers once school DOES get started? How can we influence this without becomming targets?

Average TAKE HOME is $71,000? Must be nice. That's not what they're actually earning, that's after taxes.

If you consider that average amount of time a school year runs is about 9 months, that's about $100,000 take home for a FULL years worth of work. And many of these teachers get second jobs during the summer.

If they told the actual wages for the year BEFORE taxes, it would be much higher and there would be more objection. They're trying to downplay it by making it sound like less than it is.

And again, you need to know if that includes substitute teachers and teachers aids. Are they considered teachers? Their wages are quite low and would cut into what the average would be if they just considered full time teachers. In our area a substitute teacher earns $60 per day, from 7:30 till about 3. That's about 8 hours so it's little more than $7 per hour. For babysitting, basically.

As you can see, this is a very complicated issue to figure out. They're going to try their hardest to downplay the wages and just how much the increase actually is.

The situation is that basically, the taxpayer is being forced to pay school taxes against his will under the threat of losing his property if he doesn't comply. So the teachers, who are employed by the parents to teach their children, are now demanding more money and blackmailing the parents by threatening to not teach those children. This will put the parents in the position of being forced to pay more taxes out of their hard earned money under the same threat as before. This is one of the reasons parents are objecting. I myself don't like to be forced to support someone at a better standard of living that I'm living at.

Does anybody have any idea what kind of pay increases the teachers have had over the last few years, percentage wise and how that compares to other wage earners and the cost of inflation? I can tell you, what my husband brings home is not significantly more than it was last year and yet oil and gas and utilities have gone way up. We have less expendable income because of the increases in other areas even though he has gotten raises. They just haven't kept up.

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