Ever since Wendy McCaw bought it, the Santa Barbara News-Press has lumbered downhill, becoming more of a rag than ever. The paper is nearly unreadable now – unless you enjoy constipated pundits like Randy Alcorn and Travis Armstrong. And if what Nick Welsh recently wrote in the Independent is true, the News-Press brass is devouring its own and spitting the bones on the sidewalk.
So, when folks ask me if I saw this or that piece in the News-Press, I usually tell them, “No, I don’t subscribe,” which is the reason I didn’t catch a story about teachers or housing for teachers that got one SB resident fired up. I read this resident’s Letter to the Editor, and was as shocked by its vitriolic tone as I was by its inaccuracies.
The guy lit into teachers for working only nine months a year, for being the beneficiaries of lavish health and retirement benefits, and for earning salaries as extravagant as $62 grand a year.
If only teachers had it so easy and so good. Word up to the ticked off resident: a career in public education isn’t the laid back gig you seem to think it is. First of all, starting pay is around $35,000 a year, hardly a king’s ransom for someone just out of college and more than likely saddled with student loan debt. Moreover, teachers work their butts off, particularly at the elementary level, where they must adapt or create lesson plans to meet the needs of students with varying degrees of fluency in English. Most teachers put in far more hours than they are contractually obligated for – a testament to their dedication and commitment. And with the trend toward “accountability,” meaning high scores on standardized tests, teachers are under more pressure than ever.
As far as those lavish health insurance benefits go, well, for the past several years in the Santa Barbara School District the ride hasn’t been free. Due to soaring costs caused by our broken health care system, and the loss of revenue from declining enrollment, a decline sparked by the South Coast’s exorbitant cost of housing, teachers who subscribe to the District’s medical plan have contributed monetarily toward that benefit.
This resident also expressed outrage at the possibility – and all it is at this point is one option among several – that the District might develop one or more of its unused properties into workforce housing for teachers and support staff. He’s not alone: a simple “feasibility study” has NIMBY’s pouring from the woodwork. While some NIMBY’s attack the concept and the process, others excoriate teachers for being greedy, for wanting even more from the public purse. Huge salaries, lavish health benefits and pensions, and now, housing too! For shame! How dare teachers want to live and work on the Platinum Coast without paying full freight! The hell with them! If they can’t afford to pay a million-two for a run-down tract house, too bad! Let them move to Oxnard, Lompoc, Santa Maria, Guadalupe!
Of course, with their McMansions the NIMBY’s desire top-notch local schools staffed by experienced and dedicated teachers, but not if that means building “workforce housing” in their precious neighborhood; not if that means altering the dynamics of supply and demand that are currently tipped so handsomely in their favor. The traffic! The noise! Our property values!
We contradict ourselves at every turn. As a society we are fabulously wealthy and fabulously stingy. We can’t see what is dividing us and exterminating any notion of the common good – when the common good is all we’ve got.
As Bob Dylan aptly put it: “People are crazy and times are strange.” Amen, brother, amen.
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