Monday, March 14, 2011

Students get slapped with detention slips in Madison

Via Gateway Pundit the site Madison.com is reporting that the Madison School board reached an agreement with Madison Teachers Inc regarding make-up time for the 4 days schools were closed due to the teachers calling in sick to attend the protests. 

They're adding up to 20 minutes each day for the rest of the year to make up for the lost school days. From the article:
"The School Board reached an agreement with Madison Teachers Inc. over the weekend that allowed the district to set the makeup calendar. The agreement also ensures teachers with unexcused absences will not be paid for those days and that teachers who submitted fraudulent sick notes will be suspended.

The district has not yet released the number of teachers that missed school to work those days. The district received more than 1,000 sick notes, including some from doctors who were handing them out at the Capitol protests, assistant legal counsel Matt Bell said."
Sounds like detention to me. I wonder if the kids are now happy that they got the days off so the teachers could drag them to protests where they could listen to simple-minded drumming, admire hand crafted protest signs, learn how diabolical the Koch brothers are and chant, "this is what democracy looks like" all day long? 

In other fall out from the bill, one of the reason collective bargaining was limited was that the Teachers Union often bound districts to WEA Trust, the controversial Union-ran health insurance provider for teachers. Along with being rather expensive, it is another cash cow for Unions because WEA Trust kicks back millions of dollars to the Union under the guise of 'consulting' fees.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that Cedarburg School Board is looking to switch from WEA Trust to a cheaper carrier as a cost savings measure. Other school boards are expected to do the same.

Finally, although Doug La Follette, the Democrat Secretary of State, is holding of publishing the bill as long as legally possible (primarily to extend collective bargaining time for some school districts), he will have to publish it by the end of March. This means that early in April there will be Do-or-die Union Votes to determine if the Unions are decertified. To survive the Unions will need to get 51% of the total Union membership (not just of the votes cast) to vote for the Unions. Of course, the dues will also stop being automatically deducted from the workers' paychecks at that time.

As I said in my last post, that's the first vote -- predating any recall elections by months -- that Walker's bill is going to face. Further, it is a vote that is limited to the Union people who are supposedly his biggest foes. If that vote leads to Unions losing their certification, and significant amount of cash from dues, then it will be another resounding defeat for the Unionistas. They may discover they don't have near the votes they hope they have for the recalls.

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