Volume 18, Issue 10-11
June/July, 2011
MCALLEN AFT NEWS
MAKING A DIFFERENCE
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED
IN THE LEGISLATURE!
Retirees
No 13th check out of this legislature. The discussion was all smoke and mirrors.
A bill to replace the defined-benefit TRS pension plan with a defined-contribution plan, offering no guaranteed level of pension benefits, went nowhere in the 2011 regular legislative session. We will fight tooth and nail against any future attempt to advance this disastrous idea.
Textbooks
The transition to the new testing requirements will delay the delivery of new textbooks until weeks after the start of the 2011-2012 school year. The new State Assessments of Academic Readiness will replace TAKS test next spring.
Needless Harm to Children
The legislature cut $1.4 billion in state grant funding for full-day PreK, extra help for at-risk students and other vital programs.
Rick Perry spent $3.25 billion from the Rainy Day Fund to balance the budget, but said nothing. There is only $6+ billion left—this could have helped. The legislature decided not to fund enrollment growth for our public schools.
Class Size
The attack on class-size limits was blocked by parents, community groups, and educators. In McAllen, Dr. Ponce will ask for waivers for a 3rd year in a row.
Repeal of Salaries and Due-Process
The state salary schedule is gone and so is due-process. Now teachers will be faced with personnel decisions based on cronyism and tilt the balance in state law in favor of the exercise of arbitrary power over teachers by school superintendents and school boards.
Soon, though, active and retired Texas teachers, school employees and the 80-percent-plus of Texans who opposed cuts in public education will render the decision—we’re watching, we remember, and we vote!
Social Security Fairness
The 2011 edition of the Social Security Fairness Act is H.R. 1332, introduced on April 1 by a bipartisan pair of Californians in the U.S. House. Republican Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon and Democratic Rep. Howard Berman already have attracted as cosponsors an additional 81 House members of both parties, including five Texans.
The Texas cosponsors thus far are Democrats Silvestre Reyes of El Paso and Gene Green of Houston plus Republicans Ron Paul of Lake Jackson, Michael McCaul of Austin, and Michael Burgess of Flower Mound. A U.S. Senate companion version of the bill has not yet been filed.
The Social Security Fairness Act would repeal two unfair federal pension offsets that deprive Texas school retirees (and other public servants, in more than a dozen states) of duly earned Social Security retirement benefits.
The two offsets are the Government Pension Offset (affecting benefits of a surviving spouse) and the Windfall Elimination Provision. The former can eliminate up to the full amount of the spousal Social Security benefit of a retired school employee who also draws a TRS annuity.
The latter can cut up to $375 a month from the Social Security benefit earned by a school employee’s own Social Security contributions if that employee also draws a TRS pension benefit. Under H.R. 1332, those already retired as well as future retirees would no longer face the harsh impact of these two offsets after December 2011.
Be on the lookout for upcoming messages and action alerts providing you with advocacy ammo you can use to communicate with your two U.S. senators and your area’s representative in Congress in support of the Social Security Fairness Act.
Rick Perry’s State Board
In 2009, the Texas Senate ousted Don McLeroy, the governor’s appointee as chair of the State Board of Education, because of McLeroy’s ideological zealotry and heavy-handed tactics in pursuit of a far-right agenda for Texas public schools. Gov. Rick Perry responded by nominating another far-right member of the Board, Gail Lowe, to serve as chair. Lowe proceeded to preside over another series of ideological moves by the Board, skewing state curriculum guidelines for history and social studies to such an extreme that scholars with impeccable right-of-center credentials responded with disbelief and ridicule. This spring the Texas Senate, by failing to confirm Gov. Perry’s interim appointment of Gail Lowe, once again forced the governor’s choice to vacate the chair. Now the governor has selected another reliable member of the same far-right faction, Republican Barbara Cargill of The Woodlands, to chair the SBOE. With Cargill in the lead, we may see a new flashpoint of ideological controversy as the Board’s 15 elected members consider supplemental science materials at their July 20-22 meetings. According to the SBOE watchdogs at the Texas Freedom Network, Cargill named as one of the reviewers to evaluate these materials an individual who insists that “creationism, not evolution, is the best way to interpret life’s origins” and who asserts that “physical and written testimony” proves that our planet is only 6,000 years old.