Heartbreaking: NJ Teachers To Subsist on Meager 2% Raises

As the great Governor Christie once said, you can find another profession if scraping by on $86,000 a year plus benefits is too much of a burden to bear. Well, to ease their pain upon re-entry into the real world they always have that 27% salary increase since 2004 to fall back on.

As the president likes to say before hitting the links, we all need to sacrifice.

As Gov. Chris Christie campaigned against teacher raises during his first six months in office, unions and school districts agreed to the lowest pay hikes in more than three decades, according to a survey released Thursday by the New Jersey School Boards Association.

Teachers in 75 districts who settled contracts in the first half of the year will see an average raise of 2.03 percent for the 2010-11 school year, the association said. That’s the lowest pay increase in the more than 30 years the group has kept track — and doesn’t include an additional 18 districts that broke into contracts to freeze salaries.

Association spokesman Frank Belluscio said the chief factor was the $1.3 billion in state education aid cut since January, leaving many districts faced with a choice: cut pay or see colleagues fired and positions frozen.

"We united to save jobs," said Susan Sawey, president of the Sparta Education Association, which agreed to a one-year freeze. "That was our main goal."

Jobs were also at the forefront when the West Essex school board got teachers, administrators and even custodians that had another year left on their contract to take a pay freeze, board president Phyllis Helmstetter said.

"We were very, very up front with all of the unions about that," she said. "We explained to them we would have no choice. Cuts would have to be made. They were looking out for each other."

I'm sure there won't be any hard feelings between the teachers and the governor they hold so dearly.