Oh, please. If I calculated my salary change from three years to five years, the results are virtually neglible. The people most affected would be those who would not seek to retire anyway. Gloom and doom nonsense. They should be happy they can retire.
You don’t have a ‘highest three’ calculation in your sysytem.
If you did, the system you worked under would begin to adjust to those all important three years, with promotions, job title changes, and other methods that would give you an extra 10 or 20% of pay for those three years.
Let me talk about the marginal increases in teachers salaries in NJ. We’re talking about the salary increases the senior-most teachers are getting in their final 3 years of teaching.
1. They increase their education and certification levels.
2. They take every stipend assignment possible, be it sports coach, cafeteria monitoring, study hall, etc.
3. They teach extra courses.
4. They teach summer courses.
What the union is complaining about is the fact there are only so many of these salary enhancing assignments available per school system. These slots/assignments have been passed along from the most senior teachers/admins to the most senior teachers/admins, year after year for decades, so that as many of the “in cliche” teachers/admins in their final three years can maximize their salaries to maximize their pension calculation.
The unions are complaining that there would need to be 66% MORE of these salary maximizing opportunities per school district to allow the senior most teachers to take these opportunities for the final 5 years instead of the final 3 years.
The unions is also claiming that the senior most teachers in their preplanned last 5 or 6 years of teaching would head for the exits before the new pension calculation law goes in to effect.
Let me tell you something, new teachers will fill every one of those full time tenure track positions, some schools are getting over 600 applications for every position right now.
And I’ll tell you something else, it will only take a year or two for the controlling cliche of senior teachers/administrators to adjust their salary and pension maximizing strategies to the new 5 year calculation regime. It will just cause the hyenas to become even more savage when it comes time for yearly assignments.