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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
The point is, schools are paying for your health care over the summer, even though you’re not doing work for them over the summer. That is a very good deal. Teachers can either treat the summer as a vacation, they can care for their kids without needing to pay for camps, or they can go off an get a summer job that wouldn’t need to include benefits. That’s definitely worth the small restrictions on summer employment that a teacher was complaining about earlier in this thread.[/quote]

[b]So, I will agree that having "summers off" is the number one perk of being a teacher. (#2 is, of course, having snow days and #3, your own kids' vacation day schedule, if you have kids).  [/b]

Continuing to have dental, vision, LTD premiums coverage those months (I get my health insurance through my husband's plan) is a perk as well.  It's just 4 pay periods out of a total of 26, it's not like it's some big huge benefit or anything, but yes, there is a benefit there. It's part of the understanding we have when we sign our contract.

There's an alternative: School districts could just pay us for the 22 pay periods we work, and consider us "temporarily unemployed" for the 4 pay periods we don't work.  We could file for COBRA, we could file for unemployment.  Our  biweekly paycheck would go up 18%.  Their contribution to our health insurance premiums would go down by 18% -- and then we'd need to lose health coverage for those 4 pay periods unless we contributed it on our own.  That seems really complicated to me logistically for a profession where everyone is on the same summer schedule -- where you can anticipate that there will be 8 weeks where people aren't working. To me, it makes sense that part of the salary package includes health insurance for 26 pay periods, not just the 22 you are actively working. But I don't work in HR or Payroll. Maybe it would be easier to do it a different way?

I personally don't feel that would be a decent tradeoff as it really doesn't solve any problems, except maybe it would make parents like you feel better that teachers weren't getting some great summer benefit in keeping their employer subsidized health insurance premiums for 4 pay periods?

I have to add, I don't feel there are any major restrictions on teacher summer jobs. Its true you aren't allowed to tutor your own students or students at your school for pay, but there are summer school options, and you can tutor thousands of other kids who aren't at your school.  I don't think it would be a problem if I wanted to work at a bar or anything. Probably working as a stripper would cause some issues.  Summer job choice is not a major issue of complaint for any teacher I know, anyhow.

It *is* hard to find summer employment that would be at the same rate as my usual salary.

(My biggest complaint in terms of vacation or days off is actually that all my vacation needs to be taken in the summer or at school breaks, and that I have to take 4 hours off at a time... can't just do one hour here or there (because of sub coverage). As an older teacher and member of the sandwich generation, I need a lot of time off now for medical care for family members.  But my district won't let me take just one hour off, it has to be a half day or a full day.  I would gladly give up an entire week of summer vacation, just to have a few more hours off when I need it during the school year.)

But none of these concerns come close to the most challenging aspect of teaching and the reason so many are leaving - it's the absolutely unrealistic teaching demands and expectations being placed on teachers to have students reach certain benchmarks despite the fact that they enter our classrooms without the foundational skills they need to be doing grade level work. We can write a million "I can..." statements on our board, and we can implement your curriculum with fidelity as required, and we can monitor progress and adapt the lessons and scaffold them and keep anecdotal records and implement Tier two interventions, but if students are working severely below grade level these little "mini-lessons" aren't going to cut it. They need actual lessons. Actual, below grade level lessons on below grade level skills, and that doesn't happen in a 15 minute mini-lesson. Yet we aren't being allowed to teach below grade level skills with fidelity; it's just impossible to do it in the time you give us. So we do our best, but we know it is't enough, and it just makes work even harder for the teachers the next grade up.[/quote]

DP. You make great points. Thank you for acknowledging that summers off is a real benefit. So many teachers claim that they don't get any time off during the summer because they ae taking classes, planning or doing training, but none of the teachers I know IRL spend their entire summers doing that.

Your last two statements are also huge - having snow days off and having breaks at the same time your kids do. Too often, teachers don't seem to understand how difficult it is to work and arrange for care on the many scheduled school days off and then deal with snow days on top of that. It's hell!  Having certainty about those days off is a huge benefit. It saves so much money, stress, and personal leave time that other working professionals have to deal with.

As to your last points about what makes teaching unworkable, do you have any solutions? Do more kids need to be held back? [/quote]

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