Our local school board just gave themselves a raise.  A 300% raise.

Nope, that’s not a typo.  300%.  They just voted to raise their own salaries 300%.

This is the same school board who sent its EAs out on strike last year over 30 minutes of supervision time.  This is the same school board that is currently in negotiations with its custodians.  This is the same school board that will soon be starting negotiations with its teachers.  This is pissing me off.

They can’t afford to pay EAs for all the time they work, but they can afford a 300% raise for themselves.  Somehow, when contract talks come up, the Board is always strapped for cash–implying that it’s employees should be grateful for the 2 or 3 % wage increase it manages to scrape out of the budget.  And yet, it manages to find enough to give the trustees a 300% increase. 

Politicians, even low level municipal politicans, should not be allowed to set their own salaries. It’s a recipe for abuse.  I get that it’s human nature–nobody is going to say “please, pay me as little as humanly possible.”  But it’s an all too familiar pattern, this offering of a pittance to the people who actually do the work, while rewarding themselves handsomely for the relatively few hours a year they spend doing god knows what at interminable meetings and on junkets.

Oh, and did I mention they did this with only a month to go before the municipal election?  Now that’s arrogance.