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‘IOU arrangement with public teachers’
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Posted on Aug 22 2005
Board of Education teacher representative Ambrose M. Bennett said he will be pushing for an “IOU” arrangement for public school teachers’ pay hike during the next Board of Education meeting on Sept. 1.
Bennett said he would propose that the board enter an “IOU” agreement with the Legislature in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding to give teachers their “accumulated pay hike” once funds are available or upon the teacher leaving the system.
He said the Public School System has done this with the accumulated annual leave to prevent overloading the cash responsibilities of the system at one time and this could also work for the pay hikes.
In the real world, Bennett said people pay their debts or sign a “promise to pay” agreement.
“The government can’t be forgiven for all the debts it incurred because I don’t know of one business that will forgive teachers their bills because there is no money for a pay hike,” he said.
He said it is only fair that teachers are given a “promissory note” if the government can’t pay them now. It was the government and PSS that made the promissory rule, not teachers—and both should live up to the rules, the same way that they expect teachers to do, said Bennett.
He said that the “no adequate funding and no pay hike for teachers” does not surprise CNMI teachers anymore, especially for those who have worked in the system for the past 12 years.
He said this group is missing 35 percent of its pay increases, “which may even be retrievable if teachers ever wake up as a group.” He said the Association of the Commonwealth Teachers should do something constructive for these teachers by starting a petition that every teacher will sign to support the pay hike.
“The school system has certainly done its share by asking for the money but apparently the requests are falling on deaf and seemingly biased ears when we see millions being appropriated for the pay raises of other government employees and nothing for teachers who are also government employees and voters,” he said.
