Hundreds of Boulder Valley teachers defied the terms of their contract, left their students in the lurch and stayed home early last week to protest a district salary proposal. Yet there’s not much anyone can do about it.
Isn’t there something wrong with a system in which employees are free to ignore their responsibilities in such a juvenile fashion with little worry about repercussions? Could you get away with such a stunt where you work?
To be sure, Boulder Valley teachers enjoy 12 personal leave days that they can take for any reason — including, presumably, as an individual protest against an official pay offer. But when the protest amounts to a collective action — as this one manifestly did, turning on and off as if on cue — then the participants have crossed the line.
Yet let’s put aside the issue of legality. The more important question is, what sort of “professional” would behave this way — would abandon their responsibilities and leave their employer scrambling to find suitable replacements?
My purpose here is not to indict teachers. After all, a majority of Boulder Valley teachers did not stay home last week. They upheld their pact with the district, parents, students and taxpayers. They did their jobs, as they promised they would when they were hired, no matter how disappointed they might have been with the existing wage offer.
If I were one of the teachers who put professional dedication above self-interested theatrics, I’d be troubled by the knowledge that some of my colleagues made the opposite choice. How do you create the esprit de corps necessary to cultivate academic success with people who care so little about the message they send to students by ditching their duties?
When else is it OK for adults to flout the sort of rules they tell kids they should live by?
The AWOL teachers shouldn’t be fired, of course. But their behavior ought to count against them in some way — and yet given the almost impossible burden on the district to prove why individual teachers stayed home, the incident is likely to amount to just one more thumb in the eyes of citizens who actually do honor their commitments.
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When a scapegoat is needed for this state’s budgetary woes, a politician’s first instinct is to blame the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.
Not all politicians do this, admittedly. But most Democrats and a few Republicans blame TABOR so often for every budgetary problem that you’d think voters had never passed Referendum C in 2005, allowing government to keep all revenues that otherwise would have been refunded to taxpayers.
If TABOR were responsible for the state’s current financial crunch, though, what explains the equally severe — and in some cases vastly worse — crises in other states? What explains the budgetary catastrophe in California?
According to a recent update by the National Conference of State Legislatures, “19 states and Puerto Rico faced imbalances equal to or greater than 10 percent of their budgets (in fiscal 2009), with Alaska, Arizona and Puerto Rico above 20 percent.”
Moreover, the NCSL adds, “Based on the highest gaps currently estimated for FY 2010, 32 states and Puerto Rico face imbalances greater than 10 percent of their budgets, with 11 of these above 20 percent.”
With or without TABOR, states across the country are on their heels. The only difference is that when Colorado politicians raise taxes to help make up the shortfall, they’re careful to call them “fees.”
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
