Comments record on the way?

Check out Barb Neely's Letter to the Editor on www.nwherald.com

There are already 199 comments to her letter, and there are still 22 hours left for posting.

Woodstock resident Neely is a Cary School District 26 teacher, and she takes the Northwest Herald editorial board to task for its March 10th editorial. If you hurry and are good, you might be able to find that editorial still online before the Northwest Herald archives it and expects you to pay $2.95 to read it.

Somewhere down in the early comments posted, one writer mentions that the Cary teacher earns $88,000 for teaching kiddies to sing. It seems to me that Cary D-26 ought to be able to hire a teacher for $50K less to teach kids to sing. So Ms. Neely has probably been there many years.

School districts' payrolls state-wide, and national-wide, are bloated with long-term teachers who may be doing the same work they did the first few years of their teaching careers. I mean, if you teach singing to first-graders (and I don't know what grade Ms. Neely teaches), what is going to be different year after year. Same with reading, math, handwriting. Same ol', same ol'. Just new names and faces.

Have teachers' skills increased year-by-year, to justify their pay increases? Or have the unions just jammed pay raises down the throats of the school boards (and taxpayers) with threats of strikes?

I remember one teacher in D-200 who was just treading water, hoping to make it to retirement instead of being canned for her inflexibility and unwillingness to deal with reality in her classroom. Thanks to an administration that stuck up for her and not for the student, she made it.