GRANITE, Utah – When public school officials say they have a big budget deficit, they’re really saying that they’re stuck with a mountain of labor costs that can’t be cut or eliminated.

And those labor costs can’t be adjusted because they’re usually written into teacher union collective bargaining agreements.

Cuts can be made to student programs. Younger teachers can be laid off.  But the veteran teachers who belong to the union will get their expensive perks, come hell or high water.

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It’s been a major problem plaguing public education for decades.

A prime example comes from the Granite Utah school district, which cut roughly $55 million from its general fund budget between 2003 and 2012.

Dozens of jobs were eliminated, mostly at the administrative and support staff level, leaving teachers without critical assistance. Many student services were cut or trimmed down, including a career and technical education program, alternative language courses, special reading courses and at-risk programs.

Five professional development days for teachers were cancelled. Two academic days were removed from the school calendar. Property taxes were increased to help fill the budget gap.

“There were cuts that were felt,” Granite school board President Gayleen Gandy told EAGnews. “We felt like we had cut well past the bone and into the muscle.”

The school board had not come close to restoring the cuts it had made by the start of the 2012-13 school year.

Yet somehow it was able to justify some very expensive perks for teachers in 2012-13, including a $542,934 across-the-board cost-of-living raise, $3.4 million worth of automatic, annual “step” raises, $57,263 in extra pay for student lunch supervision, and $335,033 in compensation for unused sick days.

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Those costs were all due to negotiated provisions in the collective bargaining agreement between the Granite school board and the Granite Education Association (the local teachers union).

The total of the extra costs, roughly $4.3 million for one academic year, would have been enough to restore some of the budget cuts from previous years.

Gandy argues that teachers deserved the cost-of-living raise and other perks in 2012-13, because they sacrificed during the leanest years. She also said her district’s generous benefit package helps recruit top-notch teachers.

But a strong argument could be made that nobody should have received a raise – and teachers could have lived without some unnecessary perks – until the previous cuts were restored, especially in areas where students were affected.

Remember, the $4.3 million worth of perks is just a small sampling of all the extras Granite teachers received in 2012-13.

The district also paid out $50.7 million for employee health insurance premiums, $3.5 million for retiree health insurance premiums, and $34 million toward employee pensions. Much of that money was spent on behalf of current or retired teachers.

Overall the Granite district spent $79 million on benefits for instructional staff – mostly teachers – in 2012-13. A large portion of those benefits were the result of collective bargaining.

Simply put, local teacher unions routinely siphon precious dollars that could otherwise be invested in students. That can be a real problem, particularly during lean years when choices must be made between student programs and employee perks.

“Teachers believe they are entitled to a raise, every single year,” Blake Ostler, a veteran Salt Lake City attorney who has worked on many school labor issues, told EAGnews.

When finances are extremely tight, and the unions don’t get the dollars they want at the bargaining table, they often expect something tangible in return, even if it’s bad for students.

A good example comes from the Ogden, Utah school district in the 1990s, when the school board could not justify a raise for teachers, so it agreed to cut their work days from 8 hours to 6 hours and 40 minutes.

“That was horribly detrimental to student achievement,” Brad Smith, superintendent of Utah schools and the former superintendent of Ogden schools, told EAGnews. “The board had this feeling that, gee, we have to somehow make a concession because we can’t afford a raise.

“Item after item like that arises from the culture of entitlement that’s come to be expected as part of being employed by public schools.”