Last weekend we bumped into a friend we hadn’t seen in a couple of years. She had news. R________, a guidance counselor at a local high school, was fired a couple of months ago … along with the rest of the school’s faculty and staff.
And get what the school district calls this mass firing: a “transformational model.”
Depressed yet? Oh, just wait … you haven’t heard the best part.
Last year the Arizona legislature passed a bill invalidating state teacher seniority, salary, and contract guarantees. Governor Brewer (of course!) signed it. Under the new law, school districts can’t consider tenure or seniority as a factor in determining which teachers can be laid off, nor can they consider applicants’ tenure or seniority when they rehire.
Translation: seniority can no longer protect you from being laid off, nor will seniority count when you apply for a new job.
Our friend R________, who has 25 years’ seniority in TUSD and is just two years short of retirement eligibility … along with other teachers and counselors who have years of experience and seniority and who are similarly close to qualifying for retirement pensions … now has to compete for another teaching job on an equal level with inexperienced, lower-paid teachers. Her seniority counts for nothing.
And what if she can’t get rehired? Does she then lose the pension she’s come so close to earning?
Transformational model, indeed. Why, you might almost think the new state law is part of a backdoor plan to fire high-tenure teachers, then refuse to hire them again, thus saving the state hundreds of thousands of dollars in retirement pensions. But that can’t possibly be so. Can it?
Cops, firemen, and other Arizona state employees, you might want to pay attention to this. A transformational model might be coming your way soon!
Let’s not forget Geroge Orwell’s description of political language as being designed “to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
rew