Columbus Dispatch...
Editorial: Teachers across region acknowledge that hard times require sacrifice
Saturday, July 2, 2011 

The recent wave of central Ohio teachers unions agreeing to pay freezes or smaller increases will help school districts and students cope with the financial impact of a battered economy that still hasn’t gotten its legs under it. 

Forgoing pay raises is necessary if strapped school districts are to offer students the best education possible. 

Salaries and benefits make up the vast majority of any school district’s operating budget. So holding the line on pay and benefits can avert deeper cuts elsewhere in the budget. 

Curbing pay raises means more teachers remain in classrooms and more enriching programs such as music and art can be retained. 

In Hilliard City Schools, where unions for teachers and nonteaching employees have agreed to no raises for the 2011-12 school year and reduced ones for the following year, the tradeoff is especially direct. When the Board of Education announced last month it was eliminating middle-school sports and elementary-level gifted education as part of a $3.9 million package of cuts, 200 people crowded a board meeting to protest. 

After both unions agreed to concessions, those programs were partially restored. 

Teachers and others who won’t be getting the pay increases they expected can take some satisfaction from the direct benefit their actions will have for students. 

They also should recognize that they hardly are alone in such sacrifices. Employees in all industries, public and private, have taken freezes and cuts in pay and benefits since 2008. 

Now that the effects of three years of economic distress are being felt in school-district tax revenues, teachers and other public-sector employees are having to follow suit 

The past year’s focus on public-sector collective bargaining, pay and benefits has had an unfortunate side effect: Many teachers, police, firefighters and others see the call for change as an attack on their work. They claim that the mere suggestion that public-employee pay and benefits may be unfairly rich shows disrespect for the employees and what they do. 

It does not. The movement stems from the fact that public-sector pay and benefits are out of line with the private sector. Just as important, their cost, fair or not, is more than cities, counties, states and school districts - that is, taxpayers - can afford now. 

Those trying to rectify that imbalance don’t do so because they disrespect teachers, police or anyone else. They do it because they want the entire economy to be able to prosper, and that includes the taxpayers who foot the bill.