CROTON TEACHER AIDES DESERVE A FAIR WAGE, A GAZETTE LETTER FROM PAUL STEINBERG

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To the editor:

Marie Antoinette let them eat cake. Stephen Walker won’t even let them eat a bologna sandwich on the clock.

The Croton Chronicle report on the poor pay of Croton-Harmon school teacher aides is another example of our two-tiered American society, right here in Croton. Superintendent Walker sits in his nice office, making a quarter of a million dollars every year, plus generous benefits.  Meanwhile people are taking up collections for the aides who work in the classrooms. The teacher aides who actually interact with the students all day are paid less than the high school students can make at a babysitting gig.

We hear about the “culture of respect” in the Croton schools. The hard data proves the hollowness of that claim. 

It is not simply that Croton pays barely above minimum wage. It is also the lack of respect, as evidenced by the fact that teacher aides cannot even eat lunch on the clock. Superintendent Walker makes $247,755 and nobody docks his pay as he enjoys his filet mignon. But the teacher aide making $17.08 per hour who brings a bologna sandwich from home? Welcome to the “culture of respect.”

If Superintendent Walker gets the sniffles, he can go to the doctor without worry. But the teacher aides who work full-time five days a week without health insurance? Welcome to the “culture of respect.”

I get it. When we as Croton taxpayers don’t provide medical coverage, we dump that burden on the rest of the country. Not providing health insurance screws the unfortunate schlub at the bottom of the Croton pecking order, but it enables us to pay for the valued administrators: the top nine administrators in Croton take in $1,820,618 per year—and that is just base salary.

Croton is not the richest school district, but it is far from the poorest. The decision to treat teacher aides with such contempt is not accidental, nor is it due to a lack of resources. Rather, the pay disparity reflects the values which we choose to instill in our children.

In the age of the robber barons, workers were expendable. Back then, citizens realized that the government must step in to protect workers. Over several decades, a social safety net was implemented to protect the worker from predatory employers. One part of that safety net is Unemployment Insurance, which is funded by employer payments.

Here in Croton, we have found a way around that safety net. According to the Chronicle, our teacher aides are forced as a condition of employment to sign a paper effectively waiving their right to unemployment insurance. I don’t see how this can be legal, but it turns out that school districts have obtained exemption from the state law which applies to everyone else. It certainly is immoral and cruel.

Superintendent Walker isn’t worried about paying his rent over the summer. He isn’t worried about putting food on the family table over the summer. And let us be honest: the household income numbers for Croton suggest that most of us are getting by just fine over the summer. But even in well-to-do Croton, some of our hard-working neighbors are on a tight budget. 

The unemployment loophole Croton is using needs to be closed; by legislation in Albany if necessary. In the meantime, Croton residents are not required to leave our teacher aides struggling. Basic human decency and empathy are not precluded by state law.

We make a choice to turn a blind eye to our neighbor’s struggle. We can make a choice to change; a choice to pay our school aides a fair wage. Our Mayor raced over to the high school to defend the school administration when they were teaching vulgar sex slang to tenth graders, but he remains silent in the face of the petty abuse of union workers who work in that very same high school. Our school board waves policy papers about equity and inclusion, but nary a peep about the inequity of teacher aide pay or their exclusion from health coverage. Even a paid lunch break is unthinkable to our elected school board.

Politicians won’t step in because the folks being trampled are not their constituency. For all that Croton piously proclaims our devotion to social justice and equity, we don’t want to shift money from the quarter-million dollar administrator salaries to give a living wage and health coverage to teacher aides. And heaven forbid that we raise taxes to allow a lunch break for the aides.

I don’t like paying taxes. But we are the same community which found five million dollars to put up two dozen stoplights on a deserted stretch of Croton Point Avenue. We are the same community which is going to spend whatever it takes to turn Laurel Gouveia’s tax scam into the cultural centerpiece of Westchester. We can give a fair contract to Croton’s teacher aides.

Our school board members are as feckless as our local politicians. But we can make a difference: look at what happened with the Katz construction. The contractor used cheap scab labor while sucking up government subsidies by the bucketful. It was only after public pressure that the Mayor and Village Manager did the right thing.

Superintendent Walker is educating by example. When a high schooler babysitting makes more money than their favorite teacher’s aide, the high schooler may feel sympathy but it does teach a lesson about who has value in our Croton society… and who does not. When students learn about how the rule of law protects us all, they can invite Superintendent Walker to give a guest lecture on how to screw people out of unemployment insurance. And every day when they go to the cafeteria for lunch, students should be reminded that the nice folks serving them must clock out before scarfing a quick brown bag.

Speaking of lunch… if you pass by 10 Gerstein Street, I hear the fondant is to die for.

--Paul Steinberg, Croton-on-Hudson

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SEE THE CROTON CHRONICLE ARTICLE STEINBERG REFERS TO AT  Lowest paid workers in Croton-Harmon schools hope for a better deal as negotiations for a new contract begin (substack.com)