Zais unfairly denies entire staff's impact
In response to South Carolina’s House of Representatives passing last month a blanket pay raise for all school-level employees, Mick Zais, state superintendant of education, released a letter recently proposing that only teachers, not other school staff, should benefit from these raises. He claims that it is unnecessary to give raises to entire school staff members just as the budget for the 2012-2013 school year is being finalized.
Due to the Great Recession — and the drastic budget cuts it caused — both S.C. teachers and other school staff have had to work for several years without receiving any pay raises. Now as the economy has started to improve, the state has around $1 billion extra recurring funds to spend, which should be focused on important things such as state workers’ salaries — most important among those, teachers and other school staff. Zais believes that it would not be fair for just teachers to get raises, because all state employees have been hit hard by the weakening national economy.
It should not be just teachers getting raises, it takes more than a teacher to educate a child. Sure, teachers have one of the hardest jobs, but principals and school nurses also work just as hard.
From custodians to secretaries, our lives as students are impacted in ways that we cannot see. It is because of that unseen impact that many of us are in college today; it deserves to be recognized and honored.
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