McAllen AFT News - November, 2007

Volume 16, Issue 3

MCALLEN AFT NEWS

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

13th Check Okayed For Retirees

Texas school employees who retired before the beginning of this year will receive a temporary benefit boost in the form of a 13th check approved by the Teacher Retirement System board today. The 13th check is likely to be issued early in January 2008.

Texas AFT spokesman Ted Melinda Raab told the board that this one-time supplemental benefit, equaling in amount a TRS retiree's August 2007 monthly pension benefit (up to $2,400), is of course welcome but only serves as a stopgap. School employees really need a permanent cost-of-living increase to catch up with inflation, and from then on there should be an ongoing, automatic cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) mechanism, Melinda Raab said.

Texas AFT's point was reinforced by Rep. Ruth Jones McClendon, the San Antonio Democrat who sponsored the 13th check in the Texas House but was blocked from passing a permanent cost-of-living increase by Sen. Robert Duncan, Republican of Lubbock. McClendon took the unusual step of appearing before the TRS board today to say that she looked forward to coming back next time to see them implement a permanent cost-of-living hike in pension benefits.   The current, robust condition of your pension fund should bring that day closer. The market value of the fund jumped 14.4 percent from August 2006 to August 2007. The fund is now receiving combined employee and state payroll contributions totaling 12.98 percent, while it takes only 10.4 percent to finance current benefits. That means 2.58 percent--nearly one out of every five dollars going into the fund--can generate still more investment income and finance future benefits.

Social Security Fairness Gets a Boost

Sen. John Kerry used his chairmanship of a U.S. Senate subcommittee with jurisdiction over Social Security to give a boost today to the cause of Social Security fairness. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and cosponsor of the Social Security Fairness Act, held a hearing this afternoon to shed light on the problems posed by two unfair offsets of Social Security benefits that harm more than a million public servants nationwide--the Government Pension Offset and Windfall Elimination Provision. The offsets hit especially hard here in Texas, where more than 90 percent of school employees are vulnerable to the impact of these Social Security benefit cuts imposed on anyone who receives a public pension from a job that is not covered by Social Security.

Witnesses at today's hearing did a good job of stressing that these offsets cut fully EARNED benefits--either earned by an employee's own work in other jobs covered by Social Security or earned by a spouse who was in covered employment.  Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who is a principal coauthor of the Fairness Act (S. 206), told them  “they ought to be bending over backward to empower people" to secure a decent retirement income, through a combination of Social Security and a pension from public employment, instead of punishing them for doing so.  The hearing barely touched on the issue of how to come up with the funding to pay for the full restoration of earned benefits. Sen. Susan Collins told the story of Julie Worcester, who worked in jobs covered by Social Security for 20 years, then at age 49 went to college to become a teacher and taught for 15 years, until age 68.

Mrs. Worcester was subject to the Windfall Elimination Provision, depriving her of much of her earned Social Security pension because she also gets a public pension for serving as a teacher in Maine. Mrs. Worcester gets $160 from Social Security a month, her total retirement is $800 a month.  At age 78 she is still working part-time as a substitute teacher.   Sen. Kerry and other witnesses noted that the offsets in practice are indiscriminate, doing particular harm to employees with low income.  They also mentioned that members of Congress are “pretty good at taking care of our own health care, pensions, and benefits”.  How does that speak to the people who voted them in?

Bonus-Pay Follies

In the wake of a widely publicized bonus-pay fiasco earlier this year affecting teachers in Houston ISD, the district administration is forging ahead with another dubious bonus-pay scheme, this one for principals.

A principal under this deal could qualify for up to $12,000 in bonus pay based on students' test scores.

The district has tweaked the original, hit-or-miss bonus plan that earned teachers' scorn as "a morale killer" back in January. But only some of the plan's flaws have been corrected, and now the district's new bonus provisions for principals are likely to compound one problem--namely, the tendency for the vast majority of principals to score a bonus while large numbers of teachers are left out.

As Houston Federation of Teachers President Gayle Fallon told the Houston Chronicle earlier this week, "Obviously they're showing they think a whole lot more of the principals than they do the teachers."

The district has given the new bonus program a lofty title: "Accelerating Student Progress Increasing Results & Expectations," or ASPIRE for short.

As one tart-tongued HFT member put it recently, though, from the teacher's perspective ASPIRE stands for "Another Stupid Program I Reject Entirely."

For those of you who may not be aware, Houston ISD told 99 teachers who received performance bonuses in March, 2007 that they had to pay back an average of $745 because the district accidentally overpaid them.

HISD officials said a computer programming error led them to overpay about $73,700.  The mistake caused the 99 part-time teachers and other instructional personnel to be paid as though they were full-time employees.

It is not surprising that Houston Federation of Teachers President Gayle Fallon had strong feelings regarding this previous happening.