LEVY: Union all about dominance

Hurrah for Jim Ballew! A voice of whom they can't say, "You just don't understand."

The school boards and the teachers union's battle cry is always, "If you don't vote for this, you hate kids."

I, for one, love my kids and my friends' kids, but I continue to see more and more cost and less and less educational results.

Now a voice who has been right in the thick of the battle speaks up.

When is the public sector going to realize how cushy they have it? We keep hearing how little they make and how much they work, but they don't show all the perks - the $10,000 per year payment of medical insurance, all the special days off, the three month vacation every year, life insurance, great retirement after 30 years or less and on and on. All perks that the private sector would die for.

And then they, as a token gesture, ask a very qualified independent group to look into spending and then pretty much ignore all they say.

They seem to be like so many others in the public sector who believe that the general public are somehow just a bunch of non-intellectuals who can't possibly know anything about running a public entity. Why do they think it is any different from running a private business? When are they going to run this like every other business has to?

And, of course, when it doesn't pass they will figure out ways to punish us and our kids by cutting out what ever they see as hurting us and our kids the most.

Education is about kids, not teachers and staff. The idea that more money equals better educated kids has proven false over and over. As all bureaucrats know, it's about us keeping them comfortable, not about the service provided.

I have good friends who are teachers and doing a good job, like many other teachers, but if I am not doing the job, I need to be fired and not just after three years of union wrangling.

What this is mostly about is the stranglehold that the union brass has on our schools. They couldn't care less about us or the kids, as long as they maintain their big power dominance.

JACK MEREDITH

Post Falls