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Click, I believe people have a right to be angry that they don't have good health insurance, but they shouldn't begrudge anyone else for having it. Everyone in America should have it, and the fact that we don't causes us to snipe at each other instead of demanding health care reform.
And, elsewhere on this board I've defended teachers' pay because of the education they're required to have and the high cost of living on LI. Now, do I believe that elementary school teachers need master's degrees? No, but NYS does. Do I believe teachers should receive automatic raises when they get 15 or 30 credits above the master's level? Oh, hell no! What a waste of their time and our money! But I don't make the rules. I only wish that everyone who votes down these budgets would channel their energies toward change instead of just pointing fingers at teachers, the majority of whom do not make 6 figures and are just trying to do a good job. (I know there are some absurdly overcompensated teachers and some who should be fired for incompetence, but these are not as common as irate people like to think.)
Again, I believe that consolidating and/or eliminating layers of government is the most effective way to get to the root of our tax problems and I'm glad to see you agree.
Very well put. Many people have the wrong idea about teacher's pay...which isn't that high. I think people want to vote down the budget for all the wrong reasons. (1% of teachers make a high salary) the rest are just trying to get by on LI. Why lump all teachers together and punish them for 1% overpaid? People tend to ignore our very overpaid local government and just blame schools.
Also, I don't understand why I have to go without having medical insurance for years and years and worry that one of my children could be in a car accident or get cancer or some other disease and how I am going to pay for it, when I am paying 100% of their healthcare insurance? I don't mind paying part of it, but 100%???? Who on earth in these economic times is getting free healthcare?
The police, but not the teachers. The average teacher contract, including patchogue, has teachers contributing some of their salary for healthcare and also pay into the pension.
If healthcare is such an issue, work for a company that provides it rather than being independent. Its your choice to do that.
When are Long Islanders going to wake up and realize that although the schools are good, they are not the be all and end all of education. I was born, raised and educated on LI. I lived there my entire life (49 years) and I love LI, but get real. Teachers work 180 days a year--do you get it. I am sick of teachers saying how much time they put in and they take work home. SO does half of America and they work 50 weeks a year. I am a teacher who relocated to NC and Click and rocafeller05 are so right! There are good schools elsewhere, people do become doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. in other parts of the country. I sold my home for a good price last year (taxes over $10,000 and rising every day). Paid for a bigger, nicer home in cash down here and my taxes are $2,000 (that's a year). Neighborhoods are safe and wonderful. My kids (high school and middle school) are getting a great education. I teach in elementary and we have state tests and all that accountability. We actually took a .5% pay cut for the remainder of the year because of the economy. No one was thrilled with it, BUT considering many people do not have jobs, people down here are actually grateful to be employed. At some point you have to stop convincing yourselves that those taxes actually give you something unique and special that can't be found elsewhere--because it can be.
When are Long Islanders going to wake up and realize that although the schools are good, they are not the be all and end all of education. I was born, raised and educated on LI. I lived there my entire life (49 years) and I love LI, but get real. Teachers work 180 days a year--do you get it. I am sick of teachers saying how much time they put in and they take work home. SO does half of America and they work 50 weeks a year. I am a teacher who relocated to NC and Click and rocafeller05 are so right! There are good schools elsewhere, people do become doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. in other parts of the country. I sold my home for a good price last year (taxes over $10,000 and rising every day). Paid for a bigger, nicer home in cash down here and my taxes are $2,000 (that's a year). Neighborhoods are safe and wonderful. My kids (high school and middle school) are getting a great education. I teach in elementary and we have state tests and all that accountability. We actually took a .5% pay cut for the remainder of the year because of the economy. No one was thrilled with it, BUT considering many people do not have jobs, people down here are actually grateful to be employed. At some point you have to stop convincing yourselves that those taxes actually give you something unique and special that can't be found elsewhere--because it can be.
Really? According to US education rankings, NC schools (school system) rank in the bottom 5 of school systems in the United States.
LI is not special in having well paid teachers, Westchester co. NY actually has higher paid teachers, regions of CT, rockland county, and even northern NJ has well paid teachers as well as some of putnam and dutchess, and taxes are relatively high in all of them. The northeast in general has higher salaries. People never want to look at cost of living. Granted a large number of people living in the region are making well below what a middle class income should be, but as an educated professional, teacher salary adjusted for cost of living is similiar to national standards and is not as egregious as many proclaim.
The northeast is the educational center of this country whether people want to admit it or not. Look at all of the excellent and prestigious colleges here and the many rankings always have a large percentage of north east high schools rated . The AP high school college programs in the northeast dwarf most other regions in the country with top test scores and college acceptances are high with many going to prestigious schools.
You can of course get this elsewhere as there will be good kids in any district but its certainly much less and when some schools have 10 percent of their graduating class going to ivy league schools there is something to be said about that.
Half of the people in the US take home work, where did you get that statistic from? I would like to see a source on that, who takes home work? How much wasted time is actually happening during a given work day. How many people are surfing the web when they should be working or gossiping and telling stories. Very common.
I would also suspect that the NC school system is and will continue to have some serious growing pains due to the huge influx of new residents in recent years. You can't expect even the best school system to weather that level of change without problems, starting with the most basic of simply not having enough room or experienced teachers for the dramatic increase in student populations. I'm sure this is even more true in area like Raleigh and Charlotte that have experienced the most growth in recent years.
My guess would be that in order to bring many NC schools up to what they need or want to be, there will need to be a correspondingly steep increase in their funding, i.e. taxes.
As an example, look at a few of the historically less expensive school districts out on the North Fork that have or will see ballooning budgets because of increased student population as more and more families move there for lower priced starter homes. Didn't Manorhaven used to have low taxes, for example? IMHO Greenport will be the next school-budget explosion in 5-10 years.
You live in a Long Island bubble and people outside of LI are not impressed with anyone who comes from there. When you move outside the area people are not "awed" by NY. Keep drinking the Long Island Kool Aid, you have to swallow a bitter tax bill every year for what people elsewhere already have at a much lower cost.
LI is not special in having well paid teachers, Westchester co. NY actually has higher paid teachers, regions of CT, rockland county, and even northern NJ has well paid teachers as well as some of putnam and dutchess, and taxes are relatively high in all of them. The northeast in general has higher salaries. People never want to look at cost of living. Granted a large number of people living in the region are making well below what a middle class income should be, but as an educated professional, teacher salary adjusted for cost of living is similiar to national standards and is not as egregious as many proclaim.
The northeast is the educational center of this country whether people want to admit it or not. Look at all of the excellent and prestigious colleges here and the many rankings always have a large percentage of north east high schools rated . The AP high school college programs in the northeast dwarf most other regions in the country with top test scores and college acceptances are high with many going to prestigious schools.
You can of course get this elsewhere as there will be good kids in any district but its certainly much less and when some schools have 10 percent of their graduating class going to ivy league schools there is something to be said about that.
Half of the people in the US take home work, where did you get that statistic from? I would like to see a source on that, who takes home work? How much wasted time is actually happening during a given work day. How many people are surfing the web when they should be working or gossiping and telling stories. Very common.
Also, NC school system is not in good shape.
Those $60K+ starting salaries are in very high end suburban districts where a "new teacher" is usually an experienced teacher who started out in a tough urban district and is moving on (the competition for jobs in those districts is so tough that a beginning teacher is not going to get a job there) and the pay reflects that experience. $40-50K (depending on degrees, though NY State requires a Masters degree) is more like it though I know a couple of CT districts that pay $39K to start if you just have a Bachelors.
The truth is, while the property tax rates are too high here, I also think in the big cities of the Northeast (especially, Boston, NY, DC, and almost any part of CT) more than anywhere else people are hyperly hung up about one school district vs. another. Now (using my home area of Westchester County as an example) I can understand comparing most of the Bronx with Scarsdale, I'm not naive, but I get irked when people talk about how Dobbs Ferry is "bad" compared to neighboring Ardsley. This has become so extreme in the 1990s and 2000s that in many towns you had "bidding wars" for homes to get into the "right" school district and the prices double in 5 or 10 years (while salaries of course do not). And people who live in these towns EXPECT the incredible "$ per pupil" numbers that you get from these high tax rates. In my hometown of Mt. Vernon, NY, a very "urban" part of Westchester, a controversial $200 million budget with a 10% tax increase just got barely voted on. But in Bedford, with literally 1/10 of the student population, they have only 1/2 the budget of Mt. Vernon (about $100 million). And I'm sure in places like NC with the $3500 tax bills housing costs are like 1/5 what it is on Long Island.
How can you expect property taxes to do anything but become sky high in an environment like that.
While I do think there are some incompentent teachers who are overpaid and protected by tenure (and actually prevent younger, eager teachers from getting jobs), I think this high cost/pupil in these towns, fueled by the residents extreme expectations from their school district causes these ridiculous property taxes.
Regarding work from home, I think half may be high, but more people take work home than you think. In an ironic take from what it was 40-50 years ago, it is now the blue-collar workers with hourly pay scales that work the 40 hour weeks (or sadly, less than that) and the hi-end white collar professionals who are pressured to work 60 and even 80 hour weeks (and with no extra pay since they are "salaried".....yes many of them make close to and even well into 6 figures but the truth is "salaried" was a clause put in when the overtime laws were created in the late 1930s so executives weren't being paid as "work" for golfing with clients or travel time to out-of-town meetings.....nowadays it is just abused). To meet this pressure, sometimes the only way to do it especially if you have kids is to take work home.
If healthcare is such an issue, work for a company that provides it rather than being independent. Its your choice to do that.
Choice??
If you have to work for a company to recieve Health Care,..you have no Choice!
I don't know if everyone is over-paid in the Schools or local Government.
All I know is when I was growing up on Long Island,..my Mother was home taking care of me,..My Father worked 6 days a week,..I was in a great school that had 35 students per class,..and my lunch was a soggy peanut butter and jelly mess. But I and my family where happy. Never a problem with property taxes.
Now, at 78,..my father still works to pay property taxes,..my mother works also,..Because she has no CHOICE.
Now,..kids get free lunch,..the class is 1/3 smaller.
I don't know many couples that can survive on one income.
Family units include baby-sitters and nanny's.
So, I don't think this paying higher taxes for better education worked well,...
And there's nothing you can do or say otherwise,.it is what it is,..Click is one of many that don't understand why,..like myself.
I pay 19,100 Taxes,..my parents pay 21,200.
I'm not moving,..this is my home. The American dream,..I will continue to vote "no" for any budget increase,..that's all I could do,....but the younger generation has no idea how great it was living in a happy Long Island,..no complaints,..no problems. It was a family atmosphere.
Now it's a survival school. Money, money, money,..for what???
For Less.
Long Islander are moving to other states because they want to,..they have no CHOICE!!
Last edited by thepokerdepot; 05-23-2009 at 01:52 PM..
I don't really think you can argue with someone who has been there and done that. AnotherNYer is saying that she is a teacher, she moved to NC, and her kids are just as well educated as they were up here. People are deluding themselves if they think someone looks at a resume and sees where you went to H.S. WHo cares where you went to H.S.?? It's college that counts. And which is more impressive, a SUNY school, or - say - UNC Chapel Hill?
Like s/he said, drink the Kool Aid. But I'm with her. We are outta here. If we save $10K in taxes a year till we retire, that's $200K in our pockets, and we can send the kids wherever we want for college. Like someone posted (not sure on this thread or another) - it's parents who make the most difference in their kids' education. If you are interested and involved your kids will do fine. The poorest perfomring LI districts are the POOREST - period. Let's be honest about that. THe best are the richest - Garden City, CSH, Jericho, Manhasset. And since when do only people from the northeast go to college there? My sister moved from NJ to FL a couple of years ago and guess what? She's getting letters from the Ivy League colleges and guess what? they'd rather have a kid from FL than yet another churned-out burned-out Metro-area kid. it's actually working to her advantage. NC has problems because it's growing rapidly, but the problems are moving kids around as they build new schools, not that tragic IMHO. And the person who cited NC as the bottom of the barrel - citation please??? And where does NY (ALL of NY) fall in that survey? Because I can guarantee you the most rural, poor areas of NY aren't faring so great. NC gives the CoGATS, the IOWAs - check the scores yourself. One thing they have there is COUNTY schools - you will never have 100 school superintendents making $250K a year, that's for sure. Wake County is on a hiring and salary freeze. THink you will ever see that here?
I realize that some people are tied to the northeast - NY area because of their job. That's fine, but don't act like you wouldn't live here if given half the chance to leave. I think you are jealous that some of us CAN leave and that's fine, but be honest that you are STUCK here. As pp said....property taxes are just way too high. My DH and I realize that not only do we NOT want to pay $2000 a month in taxes to live here when we retire, but our kids won't be able to afford to live in the town we live in now. Yeah, they could move to another LI town, but then what's the point of raising them here? And what are their choices? The old lovely LIRR commute to a job they may or may not like, let alone love? Just so they can say they live here, with "great schools" How much will they need for a down payment on a home? How much will their mortgage be? What will the quality of life be? We aren't leaving just for us but for them. We can live in a nice place to retire to, and they can live in a place that might be affordable when they get out of college. If you have young kids and you think they will be able to afford to live here when they grow up, get real. People with good jobs can't afford it NOW.
Last edited by twingles; 05-23-2009 at 05:37 PM..
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Won't buy ur dime for a quarter
