By Jim Vail
Special to Mychinews.com
Recently the
Chicago Public Schools released an audit of sick days that showed many teachers
were abusing their sick days by calling in sick when they really weren’t.
The Chicago
Tribune – ever the vigilant watchdog of Chicago City Hall corruption –
thundered in its editorial, “Hooky alert: Why do so many Chicago teachers take
so many sick days?”
CPS
inspectors noticed that many teachers were taking sick days on Mondays and
Fridays, thus questioning whether they were really sick. The district estimates
that improper sick days cost taxpayers $7 to $15 million per year, according to
the Trib.
CPS spent at
least $1.3 million in salaries, according to the Chicago Teachers Union, for
this “newly created squad of super sleuths.” Apparently the Inspector General’s
office doesn’t police the teachers enough.
Trust me,
there are bigger fish to fry.
How about
the corrupt no-bid $20 million contract that landed former schools chief
Barbara Byrd Bennett in prison for four and a
half years that was uncovered by a reporter. Or the UNO Charter Schools - which received
$98 million from our bankrupt state – and issued
no-bid contracts to family members, also
uncovered by a city reporter.
Why didn’t
the Chicago Tribune thunder about the school trustees who all signed onto UNO
contracts and Bennett’s $20 million SUPES fiasco?
A close look
at the IG office and Claypool’s new ‘auditors’ will reveal that the district is
focusing on policing its employees at a time when morale is super low.
Claypool has
been threatening the teachers with massive layoffs,
massive pay cuts via furloughs and ending the school year three weeks
early. There is a big rally this week to protest the district cutting special
education services.
Is it a
wonder teachers can become demoralized and want time off?
CPS used
teacher absenteeism as a reason to close schools on the South Side. The Tribune
noticed that there are schools where teachers are
absent a lot and schools where they are not.
I worked in Englewood. When I began teaching the first year, I
replaced one teacher who was hospitalized after suffering a nervous breakdown
her first year teaching, and four teachers came and went right after her. Another
teacher told me she was suffering panic attacks but had to keep teaching or she
would have to immediately pay back her student loans.
There are
many teachers in rough neighborhood schools who have been assaulted and must
take a leave of absence and use their sick days to recover.
Teaching is
a highly stressful profession, especially in the city. That is why teachers
need sick days.
Daisy
Sharp was a middle school teacher at O.W. Holmes Elementary School in
Englewood. She told Chicago News that CPS allocates all teachers ten sick days for
the school year in the contract. However, this places a serious dilemma upon
teachers. If the teachers use up the “contractual right” to those sick days,
they then risk the chance of repercussions from administration for abuse of
absences, she said.
“Many
teachers who work in highly volatile environments such as O.W. Holmes, where
students demonstrate an absolute disregard for any authority compounded with
extremely weak administrative support, their immune systems tend to break down
relatively quickly,” Sharp wrote in an email, “ultimately leaving the teachers
more susceptible to communicable diseases and bacteria and ultimately in need
of sick days for recovery. How anyone could have the audacity to question
whether teachers are in need of or deserve those sick days is simply
preposterous.”
Are there
teachers abusing sick days? Sure, but this is an internal situation for the
Chicago Public Schools to handle, not the Chicago Tribune to editorialize and
lecture.
This is the
same newspaper that published an editorial wishing a Hurricane Katrina for
Chicago so that the public schools would be washed away, and private charter
schools would replace them. No matter how corrupt they are.
No comments:
Post a Comment