On November 10, 2009 the Wall Lake View Auburn CSD face the decision to either leave the policy in place for the 2010 – 2011 school year or to vote to not offer it.
According to Superintendant Barb Kruthoff speaking for the WLVA CSD and Brent Wilhelm speaking for the Sac CSD, each time their respective board made it known that they were not going to offer an early retirement package the following year, it acted as an incentive for teachers on the edge of eligibility to take advantage of it.
The WLVA board did by consensus continue to offer early retirement for the 10-11 school year. On the evening of November 16, 2009 the Sac CSD board was also leaning the same way, with only Mr. Wilhelm expressing any hesitation saying, “ “the only problem I ever have is that …if you just continue to keep going and going and going, I don’t know whether it has …the effect of giving them the incentive to retire when YOU [the school board] kind of think you need them too or, just… that’s a $15,000 bonus when …they’re fed up. That’s the way I look at it, ‘I’m just tired of this crap, I’m gonna take the fifteen grand.’”
According to Ms. Kruthoff, any teacher that retires would have to be replaced to avoid losing the ability to offer classes. Replacing an experienced teacher with a trainee would lead to short rise in cost of training, but would start to save the district money as the second year kicked in and the teachers was actually costing the district less in wages for a net gain of savings.
According to Ms. Kruthoff, there are 5 people in Sac CSD and 6 or 7 people in the WLVA CSD that will be eligible to take early retirement.
Further complicating the decision as the fact that, again, according to Ms. Kruthoff, there are positions within the pool of teachers that will be eligible that are positions that have personnel shortages, and may be hard to fill.
There was a side discussion in which Sac School Board Vice President Dave Sands made a motion to waive the “Only meeting in joint session once per quarter” requirement so that the two boards could meet jointly to discuss with the WLVA board how to move forward, but the motion died for lack of a second. Ms. Kruthoff pointed out that if the board was going to discontinue the policy, the decision had to be made by December.
Ultimately, the Sac CSD board of Directors decided to leave the early retirement policy in place for another year.
I wonder if this is what she did when Barb quit!
ReplyDelete