Editor,

The Oak Harbor School District teachers’ walkout on May 1 coincides with International Workers’ Day, a holiday to celebrate workers by the Socialists and Communists.

A few years ago, OHSD teachers adorned red T-shirts and publicly embraced on their Facebook page the clenched raised fist symbol for autonomism, a set of left-wing political and social movements and theories close to the Socialist movement.

Class size reduction is a well-used disingenuous meme the educationists push every decade or so, but no serious long-term permanent action is ever taken to reduce class sizes. Teachers’ unions have been fighting any and all standardized testing since 1983 when the “A Nation at Risk” report came out, starting the current era of so-called K-12 educational “reform.”

While teachers protest the states’ alleged lack of increasing support to K-12 for their benefits, they also collectively bargain behind closed doors for increasingly expensive local supplementary salary contracts, drawing dollars away from local discretionary revenue derived from excess local property tax levies and Federal Impact Aid. However, no amount of money will ever satisfy the teachers’ union militancy. We currently spend, in the OHSD, almost $65 million (all funds), just shy of $12K per FTE student. Local supplementary union contracts perennially place about $2 million (about 12 percent of teachers’ total compensation) directly into teachers’ pockets, taking that local discretionary money away from classrooms.

The OHSD teachers union’s own website delineates that, “In 2015/2016, the District will increase its contribution to the health care retirement carve-out to cover 100 percent of the amount.”

William Burnett

Oak Harbor