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Consider responsibilities
Updated: January 14, 2013 2:36PM
The Lake Forest High School District teachers strike has ended. However, the bitter taste remains. The teachers union’s behavior has been revealing. The first revelation is the LFEA affiliation with state and national trade unions, the IEA and the NEA. That revelation was rather puzzling and most unbecoming.
Professionalism and trade union membership are inconsistent and incompatible.
Does the recent Wisconsin protest of Gov. Scott Walker’s reform agenda by the militant teachers union leadership who hired goons from the NEA’s rent-a-thug department resemble the sort of collaboration we want of our teachers?
The second impression one gains from the opening position of the union is that of delusional thinking — a quantum disconnect from the prevailing universe of teacher compensation and benefits. As the teachers must know, the state of Illinois is the keeper and provider of the teachers’ pension plan.
Reliance on safekeeping by the state should be the cause of far more anxiety than hard-line bargaining from the Board of Education. The Wall Street Journal, on Sept. 21, posted a sobering article about a looming government employee pension funding crisis nearly everywhere.
Al Boese
Lake Buff
