THE STRICKEN LAND II

To the gratification of all of us scandalmongers, the school scandal featured in my last week’s essay has continued to escalate and percolate through the local hills and valleys with partisans of all kinds coming out of the bush to join in the fun. The newspapers are the main battleground and are carrying lots of letters from indignant citizens and also from other citizens who are indignant about them. Are you mad? their general line seems to be, don’t you realize we’re saving a fortune when we retire a school superintendent at $350K a year and then hire him back at $250K to fill in as interim superintendent in succession to himself? If he didn’t make this sacrifice and come back to work we would have had to hire a new man at more than $250K and we’d be out money.

This is actually what we’re hearing from those who are trying to convince us that we just don’t understand the true principles of good government and consideration for the needs of the taxpayer. If we did we would recognize the righteousness of paying superintendents gobs of money for whatever it is they do, even though we’d puzzled to describe it, much less compare it to equivalent jobs in other occupations. We would stop asking questions about the art and mystery of running schools and take it on faith that it is an advanced study that only a mastermind can fully understand. Verily, verily, as the Bible says.

The critics, including the Attorney General, are asking just why is it necessary to resurrect some pensioned former superintendent to fill the shoes of a newly retired one? Or in some cases to fill his own shoes by replacing him with himself? Wouldn’t it be the normal thing to do to reach into the ranks of assistant superintendents and find one there entitled to promotion? And why don’t these people object when they find their career paths obstructed in this way by retreads from the elephants’ graveyard?

I believe the explanation is simple enough. The eager young assistant is taken aside and told “Look, just be a little patient. We’re bringing back old Joe for one last payday as an interim super. We did the search for new blood in one day and decided we wanted to stick with what we knew. Interim work can last maybe five years or a little longer. Then we’ll have to let him go or get in trouble with the law. If you’ll just wait till then, then the job will be yours. And when you retire from it, you can go the same route as Joe. You can be interim for a few years. You’ll be fixed for life and the day after.”

When school boards do these generous things, is there a quid pro quo? I know what I think. The Attorney General has subpoena power to prove me right or wrong. I can’t wait to find out.

So much for the “double dippers”, the pensioners collecting retirement money and also working a job that usually doubles their income. They have their defenders, of course. One is quoted above, rhapsodizing on the great saving effected by rehiring retirees, who theoretically are past masters of the work they retired from and are now working at again, but are graciously accepting less money for it than they would have demanded if they didn’t already have pensions.

This overlooks the fact that the so-called reduced salaries they get are actually just about as extortionate as those they would have gotten normally. How salaries have risen to this kind of stratosphere is a mystery as impenetrable as the secrets of the flying saucers. One day teachers were underpaid and all but begging on sidewalks and now suddenly they’re economic royalists and placemen rolling in dough and thumbing their noses at the suckers. Especially if they’re -- take off your hat -- “administrators.”

The particular letter I quoted here earlier is a perfect example of the sense of entitlement the pedagogues feel to their dubious gains. It’s a defense of one Robert Feger, aka the Arizona Kid, who retired from one school district with a pension of $70K yearly and now administers another one on Long Island by telephone from Arizona, getting $20K yearly for his trouble. This doesn’t sound like much unless one takes into account the fact that there are only seven kids actually attending school in his district, so that per capita he gets only a little less than $3,000 yearly per student for his phone calls. No, he doesn’t contribute the phone calls.

Well, it was all good while it lasted. A lot of people got their snouts in the trough and fed high on the hog and all that. The count so far adds up to forty administrators on Long Island ‘double dipping’, that is, collecting a pension and continuing to work in the school system at the same time. Thirty-seven of these thirty-six gentlemen and four ladies got amounts in the six-figure range going from $516K to $132K Three men got only five-figure amounts between $92K and $78K. Somebody had to be last.

Provisions for re-hiring retirees who have special qualifications exist in most civil service systems. They are meant to be exceptions, not the rule, as the Attorney General says. Things may revert to that status soon, because Tuesday is school election day on L.I. and
quite a few school board members who connived at ‘pluralism’ as it used to be called, may find themselves out of office. Lets hope their beneficiaries remember them in their
hour of need.

All the hoo-ha over school personnel hasn’t caused anyone to forget about the first malefactors exposed for enriching themselves unjustly from education money. These were the lawyers and some other professionals who got themselves designated “employees” of the schools so they could get pensions when in fact they were independent contractors not entitled to pensions. That investigation is proceeding well, with notices going out to boodlers to return their unlawful income. Settlements have been reached with some offenders. Others, being lawyers, are digging in and preparing to fight it out. They aren’t basing their defense on statutes, but on the unwritten law “This is the way it was always done.” I declare this to be an inadmissible defense and find for the state, with damages.






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