City by the Lake

Labor Management relations

Another area that the MCAS needs to look at closely is how the administration works with the teachers and staff in our system. For years now the relationship between the teachers and the administration has been on the rocks. Just recently a contract was finally worked out with the teachers after years of not having anything, but honoring a prior agreement. This new contract barely scratched the surface of the fact that the Michigan City teachers make a lower salary than just about all of their local peers in northwestern Indiana. On top of the small raise, it also got a significant amount of teachers positions eliminated, which means only one thing for the kids, larger class sizes. Repeated studies have shown that past a certian point, the larger the classes, the worse the quality of education will be for the individuals in those classes. Now if you add in lower than competitive salaries and growing workload to an accrimonious relationship with management, you begin to run into a real problem with attracting and maintaining quality labor in any field, let alone in the education field. This has become very evident in Michigan City as we have had real problem attracting and maintaining the top talent in the area. Even if we manage to bring in young and talented teachers, after a short period of time being underpaid and seemingly unappreciated by their bosses, they quickly go looking for greener pastures in surrounding school systems, if they aren't forced to leave by cutbacks from above.

No workplace can meet their potential levels of productivity when they are constantly having to recruit and train new employees to replace the ones that were seemingly just hired. Michigan City needs to be able to offer itself as not only a quality place to send your kids to school, but to be a top tier educational system, you need top tier educators. You aren't going to attract top employees with a bad reputation, poor salaries, and a hostile relationship with the administration. The hatchet needs to be buried and stability instilled in the teaching pool.

posted by southsider2k5 @ 10:37 AM