THE STRICKEN LAND

Long Island never ceases to amaze. I lived in Westchester for twenty-five years and things never hit the fan the way they do out here. The scandals never stop. In my other venues, New York City was a monastery by comparison, Rockland County a holy city. In L.I. by contrast, since I moved here a few years ago we’ve had, first the Roslyn school scandal with the school administrators walking away with $11,000,000 in school funds, leaving only the blackboards and desks behind, then the volunteer firemen spending taxpayers’ millions in building palatial firehouses with built-in nightclubs to enhance their social life, and now the endowment of lawyers and other non-employees of our school systems with six-figure pensions for life on the pretext that they were actually employees. Is it necessary to add that no career as a building inspector here is complete without a jail stretch involved or that the same applies to plumbing inspectors, electrical types and all other guardians of local construction integrity ?

It shouldn’t be thought that just because non-employees were so adept at riding the gravy train, actual employees missed out. Far from it. In particular, it seems, the title of superintendent carries with it a license to steal. One of them is featured on the front page of Newsday today. He runs his district by remote control. From Arizona. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. His district includes only nine students actually attending locally, with the other seventeen taking their classes in another district. For his guidance of these lucky twenty-six he is paid $20,000 yearly as an interim employee. This doesn’t seem bad -- almost $1,000 a year for each student, none of whom he actually teaches anything -- but there’s a sweetener in the shape of a $70,500 retirement benefit that he gets for his previous career in the district, where he has now returned for a farewell performance -- from Arizona. In the story he is seen sitting on his porch in the foothills there while using the telephone to inspire his subordinates in New York. How he became the superintendent of a “district” that isn’t equal to a classroom in a normal district and who arranged for him to collect $90,500 a year for running it by telephone isn’t explained and probably never will be.

Newsday reports that approximately forty school superintendents and assistant supers are collecting about $11 million annually in combined pay and pensions by operation of a law that permits them to return as “interim” supers immediately after retiring and beginning to collect a handsome pension, practically all in six figures, which is now matched or exceeded by the annual salary paid for actually working. ‘Let the good times roll’ has got to be the motto of these heaven-blessed individuals who obviously are in good with God.

If people object to me being flippant about the good luck of these people, I won’t apologize. I just don’t have that high an opinion of the work or whatever it is done by school superintendents. In ghetto districts out here they sometimes get fired when the district goes broke from too many sweetheart contracts with friends and relatives of the school board or through some similar swindle, but generally they remain in office up to the onset of senility. After that they go “interim” for a prolonged time until finally retiring for good when practically ready to pull the graveyard grass over them like a blanket. And all the time not one person in ten in their district even knows their name or what they do for a living.

Returning to the other concern we have with educational ripoffs, it’s heartening to report that, thanks to Newsday’s exposés, some heirs apparent have been nobbled at the gate just as they were set to dash off with the big prize. Two were private lawyers and one is an accountant. While in private practice they had managed to accumulate sixty years of employee pension credit between them even though none of them had ever actually been an employee of the school districts reporting. The amount of the pensions lost hasn’t been given, but there can’t be any doubt that it would have been Long Island substantial. L.I. pensions are the gifts that keep on giving.

The bloated pensions of the education bureaucrats are accumulated in ways that would test the ingenuity of any Wall street “compensation expert.” In the most outstanding case, where a highly successful superintendent has hit the jackpot for a $316,000 pension plus a $200K salary, his pension was based on his best five years compensation and they were good years indeed. His compensation was computed to include not only the exorbitant salary he got each year, but also the merit pay bonus he always received, plus $7,000 compensation for having no car provided, plus an equal amount for “conference expenses”, plus the value of the life insurance his board gave him, plus $26,000 representing the amount they paid out for his tax-sheltered annuity, and on and on. Presumably this character and his friends were good at making speeches about their dedication to the needs of the children (sob) entrusted to their care and the high ideals which animated their actions in furtherance of their mission, to the success of which they had committed themselves with no thought of the personal sacrifice involved.

If anyone thinks that this kind of rhetoric will be in abeyance at least for the time it takes to separate some of the money-grubbers from the honey pot they’ve been feeding on, he should read some of the letters flooding in to Newsday from defenders of the system now being exposed. They come from public school lifers for the most part and show their writers to be in full denial mode. Too much is being made of the regrettable actions of a a few bad apples in a system that is otherwise a credit to the outstanding work force that has produced results never approached by educators before. No actual facts are cited, but eventually the names of National Merit Scholars and the like will be produced as proof that the millions thought to have been dispatched down a rathole were not actually wasted.

All this proves to me is that the Russians were right when they said “public property is nobody’s property” and treated it accordingly. I worked in a public-property job and waste was the order of the day. School property offers the chance not just to waste money, but to steal it or chisel it also. So does private property, but against this abuse it sets the barrier of accountability. Private property belongs to somebody, not nobody, and that somebody, whoever it is, will guard it to prevent abuse and conserve value. In this light public education presents itself as kind of overripe fruit oozing juice being lapped up by an army of parasites. They’ve had their fill; why give them any more nourishment?






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