By Jordan Marks
EAGnews.org

ALLENTOWN, Penn. – The Allentown, Pennsylvania school district is on target to amass a $17.4 million budget deficit and a negative fund balance by 2017, according to a story published on LehighValleyLive.com.

In response to that gloomy financial forecast, the school board voted last week to increase property taxes by 4.8 percent and cancel most of the all-day kindergarten classes in the district.

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That means overburdened taxpayers and the smallest children will pay the price for skyrocketing labor costs in the district. It shouldn’t be this way.

The district’s contribution to the state retirement system, as well as the cost of benefits for school employees, are expected to increase by more than 300 percent by 2017, according to the news report.

Benefits for district teachers and staff currently amount to 29.9 percent of salaries, which is a reasonable ratio in comparison to other governmental entities, according to school board member David Zimmerman. But they are expected to increase to a whopping 58.2 percent of the amount spent salaries by fiscal year 2017.

“I don’t know of any business that can sustain itself working at that kind of ratio for employee benefits,” Zimmerman said.

These rising costs, according to board member Scott Armstrong, are the “real culprit” for the district’s financial woes.  He believes the teachers union should step forward with concessions  to help manage the situation.

“This board and the public must ask our public school employees if they are willing to do the right thing and negotiate a sustainable defined contribution pension, or will they put their own interests ahead of the public school district and the educational needs of our students,” Armstrong said.

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Debra Tretter, the president of the teachers union, predictably called Armstrong’s request “unreasonable” and a “bad investment (for teachers) during a poor economy.”

“Once again they are putting this on the backs of teachers,” Tretter said. “We don’t intend to go to a defined contribution plan unless we are dragged there kicking and screaming.”

How nice. Salary and benefits for union employees eat up about 75 percent of the general fund budget in a typical school district. If a cash-strapped school board can’t touch that part of the budget, its options are generally limited to reducing staff (and increasing class sizes), cutting student programs or sending the bill to the taxpayers.

Schools are supposed to benefit students, not the adults staffing them. That means the adults who work in the schools must make sacrifices to ensure students are held harmless.

That’s not happening in Allentown, and the union deserves the blame.