DETROIT – Anyone who has ever taken out a loan to buy a used car that later turned out to be a real lemon knows that loan has to be paid back, regardless of the car’s quality.

Detroit Public Schools leaders are re-learning that hard truth after an arbitrator ruled recently that the district must repay roughly 80 now-fired teachers for wages they deferred years ago to help the district pay its bills.

The deferred wages in question range from $435,000 to $700,000, according to Freep.com.

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The news site explains that DPS teachers in 2010 and 2011 had $250 taken out of each paycheck with the “promise that they would get the money back when they left the district.”

For some inexplicable reason, Detroit school leaders decided that teachers who were eventually fired by the district weren’t entitled to their deferred wages. The teachers’ union – the Detroit Federation of Teachers – filed a grievance over the bizarre policy, and an arbitrator has sided with the union.

Arbitrator David Tanzman ruled the funds were “in effect a loan” and should be repaid to the discharged employees, Freep.com.

We sympathize with leaders of the cash-strapped district who don’t want to see their scarce financial resources go toward paying former teachers who obviously weren’t getting the job done in the classroom.

Still, those teachers deserve the money they deferred to help the district through an especially ugly financial time. Writing that six-figure check is going to hurt, but it’s the right thing to do.

A deal’s a deal, after all – even when it involves making payments on a real lemon.