CITIZENS
for
Limited Taxation & Government
Post Office Box 408    Peabody, Massachusetts   01960     (617) 248-0022
E-Mail:  cltg@cltg.org       Web-page:  http://cltg.org

CLT&G Update
Saturday, August 29, 1998

We've heard the spin from the teachers unions, how all it would take to teach Johnnie to read by the time he graduates from college is better paid teachers and, all together now one, two, three . . . more money.

We've heard how teachers get less respect than even Rodney Dangerfield on his best day.

We've heard how poorly underpaid teachers are compared to doctors, lawyers and Indian chiefs.

We've even heard a rumor that the union has attached their paychecks by another $45.00 a year, no doubt to refill the union's coffers after its million dollar "Break the Promise" campaign to defeat the promised income tax rate rollback!

But we've never heard this one before: Hate-speech from a desperate, floundering, and no doubt overpaid public school bureaucrat!

Is it just me, or do you too notice a pattern forming here, like everyone's reading off the same talking-points page?

Guess what's coming next . . . but then, we've already warned you that Proposition 2½ was in their gun-sights.

Chip Ford --

The Salem Evening News
Friday, August 28, 1998

Reporter's Notebook
By ALAN BURKE
News Staff

MARBLEHEAD -- Drawing and quartering is too good for her!

The new Salem school superintendent, Herbert Levine, told the Evening News that Proposition 2½ has had "a tremendously negative impact." He cited all the teachers discouraged from entering the profession, the ruinous cut-backs and general damage to education.

Finally, he placed a black cloth on his head, figuratively, and aimed his guns on the mother of it all, saying, "Barbara Anderson should be tried for murder -- the murder of the minds of a generation of kids."

"This is unique," laughed Anderson in reply, putting it on par with a candlelight procession in Brookline, in the style of Vietnam War protests, once held to denounce Proposition 2½. "It looks like ignorance is a problem not only with the graduating teachers, but with the superintendents as well."

Anderson points out that Salem voters supported Proposition 2½.

In the same week, Marblehead's own superintendent, Phil Devaux, linked problems with the Coffin School to Proposition 2½. "It's not a coincidence that municipal building maintenance was so often deferred in the 1980s. Deferred maintenance always leads to an accounting."

Meanwhile, Anderson believes that state money still promised for the renovations at the Coffin should make the town spending allocated by last spring's override unnecessary. She wants the money back.

"Initially, I thought I was going to be double-dipped," she complains. But the nature of the state money -- it's likely to be a "reimbursement" -- means that the taxpayers get relief, she says.

"Marblehead has more than enough money for its schools," she concluded. "No children will have to die because of Barbara Anderson."

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