Furloughs alter teachers' schedules, paychecks

By Nancy Badertscher and Alyse Knorr


The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

At Webb Bridge Middle School in Alpharetta most teachers will be working the last of three furlough days Friday.

Yes, working — without pay.

If the roll were taken, teacher attendance would be classified as “very good,” Webb Bridge principal Elizabeth Fogartie said Thursday. “They’re booked solid every minute.”

The teacher furloughs — believed to be a first for Georgia — are altering the schedules and paychecks of the majority of the state’s 120,000 school teachers. Some teachers are philosophical about the unpaid days. Others are plainly unhappy.

Michael Witt, a fourth-grade teacher at Alpharetta Elementary, is in the latter camp.

“They’re unpaid work days,” Witt said. “It’s horrible. That’s like telling parents you can’t go Christmas shopping, but you’ve got to get presents under the tree.”

He said he worked two of the three furlough days this week, only because he had so much to do.

“People worked, and they wanted us to work,” Witt said.

The furloughs are expected to save the state about $33 million a day and to cost the average teacher about $200 a day. They’re just part of the belt-tightening that educators are enduring.

Roy Sams, who teaches art and yearbook at the new Twin Rivers Middle School in Gwinnett, says “we don’t have the budgets that we used to.”

Sams spent part of this week hanging paintings and pencil art drawings he did over the summer to give an artistic feel to the shiny walls and “to kind of lead by example.”

“I’m going to have to do projects that are a lot cheaper and with supplies I get for free,” he said.

In Fulton County, school administrators weren’t purposely trying to get the dreaded days out of the way before school starts Monday.

“We didn’t really have a lot of options,” said Susan Hale, the district’s spokeswoman. “We were told they had to be on contracted work days that are non-student days.”

Teachers at Twin Rivers and other Gwinnett schools can now erase two of the three furlough days from their long to-do-lists. “It was definitely a challenge having the furlough days, but the work still has to be done,” Principal Linda Boyd said. “For the kids you have to be ready, and my teachers are stepping up.”

A majority of the state’s 180 school districts decided to furlough teachers. Most scheduled one or more furlough days for the period normally reserved for pre-planning. But some districts scheduled the unpaid days as late as Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks.

Martha Brick, an eighth grade physical science teacher at Five Forks Trickum Middle School in Lawrenceville, didn’t come to school on Gwinnett’s furlough days — Monday and Tuesday — but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been busy getting ready for the start of school.

“I came in a few hours the week before,” said Brick, a teacher for 22 years.

Teachers, she said, aren’t thrilled with having to take a cut in pay. “But I think most of us understand and are grateful to have a job.

A few systems — including Cobb, DeKalb, Atlanta and Marietta city — will not furlough, opting to cover the salary expenses themselves.

“The furlough situation has certainly dampened morale and gotten the new year off to a less than scintillating start, said Tim Callahan, spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators (PAGE).

“It has compressed the amount of time many teachers will have to get their classrooms ready for students and to attend to the myriad paperwork and administrative details that surround the start of a new school year – class rosters, preparing grade books, registers, seating charts, bulletin boards,” he said.

The furloughs are shrinking those paychecks just as many teachers are shelling out hundreds of dollars for construction paper, felt and other materials that can be turned into eye-catching works of art for their classroom walls.

Teachers spend an average of $476 on classroom supplies — $552 at the elementary school level — according to a 2006 study by the National Education Association.

Making it even tougher for Georgia teachers this year: They don’t have the $100 gift cards that Perdue has doled out in the past to help with supplies.

Teachers invest “a huge amount” of their own money in supplies, something that’s not expected in most other professions, said Olga Jarrett, a professor in Georgia State University’s Department of Early Child Education.

But teachers see the benefits, Jarrett said. “And they are sufficiently dedicated that they’re willing to pay out of pocket to see it.”

Herb Garrett, executive director of the Georgia School Superintendents Association, said teachers have taken a financial hit in the past.

Once in the 1980s or 1990s, he said, the General Assembly gave teachers a pay raise, but later rescinded it in a special session.

“Carvin Brown, a long-time professor of education administration at UGA, always said that, if that didn’t cause teacher unions to form in Georgia, we’d never live long enough to see them,” Garrett said.

Longtime educators “realize there are ups and downs,” said Sheryl Gowen, chair of Georgia State University’s Department of Educational Policy Studies.

“All the research shows us that people who choose teaching as a long-term profession are not in it for the money,” Gowen said.