By B.B.

Nov 12, 2008 9:30 PM | Link to this

Before I became a teacher, I always heard that it would be nice to be a teacher, because teachers get the summers off. Yes, that is true, but we only get paid for working 190 days out of the year. Our pay is divided into 12 months.

When I began teaching, I heard some of my fellow teachers saying that after 19 years(20 now) of teaching, you would not get a pay increase unless there was a state wide pay increase. I thought they were joking, but boy was I suprised.... Who in the cooperate world would work 10 years without a pay increase? Not many....

Now, you are wanting to cut our raises. It just doesn't make sense.

I spend almost a thousand dollars a year buying things for my classroom. I want my children to have what they need to be the best they can be. Over the years I have seen such waste from our government. The leaders should be ashame of themselves. Education is like a very large business, and should be treated like one. Large business can't survive when so much waste is being conducted. Well, neither can education.

Over the last few years, I have seen young adults go into other fields other than education. I think it is very sad. Someone had better wise-up, before our educational system gets worse.

For those who say that teaching is an easy job, I wish they would come into my first grade classroom and see what I do.

Please stop the wasteful spending in our government, and put the money where it needs to be--INCREASING TEACHER'S SALARIES AND IN OUR SCHOOLS.......

.

By Jon

Sep 8, 2008 12:50 AM | Link to this

Teachers are one of the great backbones of America. We need to take care of them. With students lives at stake and the need to educate, it's not like other jobs where you can leave but you might think about it or see what is available to you. I've used a service for teaching jobs that gives me a lot of options to see what jobs are available.

By sandra

Aug 3, 2008 2:56 PM | Link to this

I did not vote for perdue and i am glad

By Toilets and TVs

Aug 2, 2008 9:35 PM | Link to this

What's really sad here, is that the state cutting our salaries is a symptom. As a teacher, I have seen so many misappropriated funds; that's how they SHOULD be seen. My superintendent recently got a 36 inch LCD HD TV mounted on his office wall. And because we have done some "restructuring" AGAIN, many usable buildings will not be used anymore, and there has been new construction added to existing buildings. We have had multiple software programs bought, tried, and dropped through the system. SPEND.SPEND.SPEND.

Meanwhile, I furnish everything for my classroom, because my department needs to use the allocated money for us for other things. No one is there when I am "off" work and going into the scariest part of town to find a kid I haven't seen in days. No one pays me to read and grade 135 research papers among all of the other assignments until wee hours of the morning. There is no 8 hour day for a teacher who does his/her job well, and we should get raises just like anyone in the corporate world. Better yet. Pay for performance. 98.7% of my students passed the graduation test the first time in both English and Writing. So, I should get a BIGGER raise! I'm just kidding about the last part, most of us do THE BEST WE CAN with who they send us. But some of us work from the heart so that, one day, society will benefit.

Those who can, teach. I could have done lots of things, but none would influence the corporate, medical, legal, or business world like my job, and I deserve the raise that I was promised.

Georgia needs to "restructure" their spending habits and stop writing checks that their TEACHERS can't bank on. We are here for Georgia, is Georgia going to return the favor?

By John Brown

Aug 1, 2008 4:35 PM | Link to this

I work for a technical college. Administrators hire their friends and relatives and create positions to justify their pay checks. Twenty percent of administrators can be eliminated to create more teacing jobs.

By Georgia Legislators Are Criminals

Aug 1, 2008 9:26 AM | Link to this

I'm so happy to see that Georgia is in a major fiscal crisis. The state of Georgia and many (or most) of its local governments are criminal regimes that deserve nothing but problems. I say that based on the fact that they have passed so many illegal "sex offender" laws and will continue to do so until it becomes even more completely, abundantly clear that the laws are worse than just worthless and not really about "public safety" or "protecting children" and too many decent people demand that the politicians utilize facts, respect reality, and stop passing the laws.

The vast majority of Georgia citizens love the lies of the pandering politicians who created these laws and they support them. Therefore, Georgia and most of its citizens deserve all the misery they can get. I pray the economic crisis worsens and devastates Georgia.

Our criminal governments have grown far, far too large and are doing far, far too many tasks that they have no business ever doing. The law enforcement enterprise of the Criminal Regime of Georgia similarly has grown far, far too large and just has way too much time on their hands. The "sex offender" laws cannot be controlled by working on Georgia's legislature because they have proven that they will not utilize facts nor respect reality. I personally won't even attempt to work with those criminals any longer.

Some of the methods of controlling the laws that are being employed are to use the courts, civil disobedience and conflict, and economic warfare. The last item has worked fairly well and I will work hard in the future to ensure that Georgia's law enforcement agencies continue to not have the resources they need in order to accomplish their duties to any successful degree. Georgia's legislature have woken up a problem that isn't going to end. They have started a completely unnecessary war in exchange for no benefits at all.

By mark

Jul 31, 2008 2:22 PM | Link to this

Why is it when the State is in finacial trouble it turns to State employees to help fix the problem. When emoploees are not getting raises haw can we keep up with inflation. Ronald Ragan made this statement and it stands true..."We are with the Government and we are here to help".

By Jen Sauer

Jul 31, 2008 9:38 AM | Link to this

More teachers need to be speaking out. We obviously have some good ideas, why aren't we taking it to the public? Why aren't we talking with our parents on these issues? They have jobs that are being cut, right? It is time as teachers we start communicating the real situation at schools and realize that we are in this together WITH our communities, including immigrants that we all come from (unless you are native american). We have the money, we just need to be spending it equitably and spending it on education not testing books and materials that actually make profit for big business, not schools. Sonny and Bush, unleash the billions that were promised to us with NCLB, and then let us take the wheel. And...yes, we can have a union if 80% of us agree to sign onto one. The question is, will teachers like ourselves come together to do this for each other, the students, and parents?

By Concerned Teacher

Jul 31, 2008 12:12 AM | Link to this

Teachers, by their generous nature, bring some of their problems on themselves. Many refuse to set reasonable boundaries on their "unpaid" time worked and limit their personal expenditures on classroom supplies. When a teacher does stick to the terms of the contract (190 days @ 8 hours a day) and stay within the school provided supply budget, he/she is assumed to not be doing his/her job - when in fact, he/she is.

I'd be very satisfied with my present salary if all I had to do is teach. Unfortunately, teacher salaries haven't increased in proportion to stakeholder (parent and community) expectations.

By Ms. Risa

Jul 30, 2008 11:49 PM | Link to this

Georgia, get it together. You are thinking of not giving teachers a raise and yet you spent how much on toilets for the city of Atlanta? You should cut back in important areas. Like fire the person that approved million dollars toilets. If we stop educating illegal aliens and send the children back to their country with their parents we would also save that way. People please vote, it's time to change our leaders.