If you consider that average amount of time a school year runs is about 9 months, that's about $100,000 take home for a FULL years worth of work. And many of these teachers get second jobs during the summer.
If they told the actual wages for the year BEFORE taxes, it would be much higher and there would be more objection. They're trying to downplay it by making it sound like less than it is.
And again, you need to know if that includes substitute teachers and teachers aids. Are they considered teachers? Their wages are quite low and would cut into what the average would be if they just considered full time teachers. In our area a substitute teacher earns $60 per day, from 7:30 till about 3. That's about 8 hours so it's little more than $7 per hour. For babysitting, basically.
As you can see, this is a very complicated issue to figure out. They're going to try their hardest to downplay the wages and just how much the increase actually is.
The situation is that basically, the taxpayer is being forced to pay school taxes against his will under the threat of losing his property if he doesn't comply. So the teachers, who are employed by the parents to teach their children, are now demanding more money and blackmailing the parents by threatening to not teach those children. This will put the parents in the position of being forced to pay more taxes out of their hard earned money under the same threat as before. This is one of the reasons parents are objecting. I myself don't like to be forced to support someone at a better standard of living that I'm living at.
Does anybody have any idea what kind of pay increases the teachers have had over the last few years, percentage wise and how that compares to other wage earners and the cost of inflation? I can tell you, what my husband brings home is not significantly more than it was last year and yet oil and gas and utilities have gone way up. We have less expendable income because of the increases in other areas even though he has gotten raises. They just haven't kept up.
Not sure about the aides and substitutes. The information was put out by the district, not by the union, so I think its safe to assume that its reasonably accurate.