School employees' salaries to be posted online

Following the lead of State Auditor Glen Gainer and the Kanawha County Commission, Kanawha County school officials now will post the names and salaries of all school employees on their Web site.

[Karen]

Great idea for the public to view the salaries, but I just visited the Kanawha County Schools website, and I could not find anywhere on there where it list individual names and salaries. I hunted and hunted and finally gave up. So, note to teachers, don't get so worried about it...we can't find where this information is at anyway. We know it's there now, but where exactly does one go to find it??

[cornpone]

Karen wrote:

Great idea for the public to view the salaries, but I just visited the Kanawha County Schools website, and I could not find anywhere on there where it list individual names and salaries. I hunted and hunted and finally gave up. So, note to teachers, don't get so worried about it...we can't find where this information is at anyway. We know it's there now, but where exactly does one go to find it??

it's in the article " www.wvsao.gov " scroll to page end ,download the adobe file...

[Old Salt]

Teachers use a lot of bogus arguments to get raises. They especially like to compare WV state ranking nationwide in pay, and to nearby states but they do not mention the lowerer cost of living here or what their actual pay is.

A few years ago a teacher told me that increasing my taxes to give him a raise would be good for the local economy. He actually said that.

Too many teacher do a bad job. Everybody involved knows who the good teachers are and they deserve great pay. The teachers talk about how important education is but oppose more teacher accountability in their performance. They oppose more pay for those who can qualify to teach more challenging subject areas like physics, chemisty and math.

Teachers and their unions are all about teacher pay and security, and that's about all.

[lavender_wolf]

I can't tell if the database has public school teachers pay listed. I know you can search higher education institutions like Marshall but can you searh for high school employees?

[Jen]

The reason you have so many teachers who do a "bad job" is because teachers ARE under paid. Therefore, you get the folks who are sometimes not as serious about their job as they should be, nor are they as qualified as they could be. As a a starting teacher in Kanawha County, you make about 28,000 per year. Pay goes up with experience and increase in education. We work 50-60 hours a week. Contrary to popular belief, we are not done at 3pm when the students leave the building. We have to grade papers, plan class activities and write lesson plans, and attend school meetings. We have to respond to an overwhelming amount of parent questions and concerns. Also, we don't really get the summers off, as one might assume. We have to plan for the next school year; write, read, and update curriculum and lesson plans, take summer classes to keep up with higher education requirements; go to conferences and workshops to fullfill our CE credit hour requirements.
As a closing thought, consider the following statement...It is no more difficult to teach math, chemistry, physics, etc. than it is to teach history, english, music, or art. With the subjects you mentioned as being more difficult, you are teaching students to follow a designated process with concrete ideas and concepts. With history, english, or art, you are trying to teach students to think for themselves rather than telling them what to think and do. Have you been in a classroom lately? The students want to be told exactly what to think and what to do. They want the teacher to tell them the exact answer. They do not want to think for themselves. In my opinion, and based on my experienec in the field, it is much more difficult to teach students to think for themselves than to plug numbers into an equatio, to memorize the periodic table. No group of subjects is more difficult to teach than the other, just different. I think the "people" you mentioned whoever they are, that were opposed to higher pay for math and science teachers are pretty accurate...that would be called biased, or even discrimination.

Old Salt wrote:

Teachers use a lot of bogus arguments to get raises. They especially like to compare WV state ranking nationwide in pay, and to nearby states but they do not mention the lowerer cost of living here or what their actual pay is.
A few years ago a teacher told me that increasing my taxes to give him a raise would be good for the local economy. He actually said that.
Too many teacher do a bad job. Everybody involved knows who the good teachers are and they deserve great pay. The teachers talk about how important education is but oppose more teacher accountability in their performance. They oppose more pay for those who can qualify to teach more challenging subject areas like physics, chemisty and math.
Teachers and their unions are all about teacher pay and security, and that's about all.

[Reader]

at Mountain View School we a few good and some great teachers but the others run the school please never let your child laugh or appear to be having a good time learning because "the other" teachers will see they are punished in one fashion or another. I guess their lives are so miserable while in the classroom makes me wonder why they didn't get a different profession,heaven forbid your child having gas or needing to go to the bathroom.

[welfareman]

Jan confuses being qualified to teach a subject with techniques of teaching.

Jan overstates the requirements of summer. One old friend Principal told me the best part of teaching was "summers off".

Finally, Jan starts off saying, basically, if you pay teachers better they'll take their responsibilities more seriously and teach better.

[Jen]

My name is JEN, not Jan.

Summer requiements for teachers are getting more and more demanding as the years pass. And, in many states you must pay for your required classes without the guarantee of reimbursment.

I did not mention techniques of teaching anywhere. I was, and still am, talking about content. It is NO MORE DIFFICULT to teach one subject than the other.

[Grown up]

Can one person think of a career that warrants more pay than a school teacher? Because without the school teacher, you would have no one educated enough to do any of those jobs. There would be no doctors, lawyers, politicans, carpenters, electricians, etc. So, the entire counties economy begins at the school teacher. Yet, we are looked at like full-time babysitters. And yet we are paid less than full-time babysitters. We are not in it for the money, you should be thankful for that. Otherwise, you would have to educate your own children and where would we be with that?

[Old Salt]

So, with a career so important to the entire society, why should we be forced to tolerate bad teachers?

[reality is]

Old Salt wrote:

So, with a career so important to the entire society, why should we be forced to tolerate bad teachers?

Perhaps they're the best that can be found. The pickings are getting slimmer because fewer people want to go into teaching and stay in it.

[Old Salt]

It was not long ago that most recent college graduates with Eduation degrees could not find jobs teaching. It has not changed that much.