Ms. Ada Keila Estrada expressed her opinion about school vouchers and deficient teacher’s salaries in your Dec. 18 edition. I am one of those teachers and one of many who have worked in the business world and the field of education and have feelings on both sides of the fence!
Teachers are special! Working with students all day long is a true testament of the moral fiber required to be a classroom teacher!
In the business world, the average person works five to six days a week and eventually earns a two-week vacation opportunity. That amounts to about 298 working days with the two weeks off. At $15 an hour, that weekly paycheck averages $600 or $30,000 a year.
A beginning teacher in Brownsville starts at $48,000, works 187 days a year. They get a week off for Thanksgiving, a week for spring break, two weeks off for Christmas, seven weeks off for summer and a day for Charro Days. The average teacher’s salary at BISD is $61,491. The funds are paid out in 12 payments over the year.
I am comparing a professional to a non-professional in salaries paid but a professional exempt employee in the business world works more hours and days than their hourly employees! The state of Texas is not the problem!
Are teachers unhappy with their pay, their work environment and general work requirements? Absolutely! How do you fix this? Go out and vote! Elect school board members who don’t pay ridiculous salaries to superintendents and then allow the super to pay exorbitant salaries to administrators to buy their smiles! That is an area where funds could be better spent!
That is the problem and I have given you the fix! Get off your booty and go out and vote!
Ernest Gorena
Brownsville
Affirmative action backed
I read Ernest Gorena’s opposition to affirmative action (Dec. 22) and as a “perceived” white woman who grew up evidently at the same time, we had far different experiences. Women in my family in the New Jersey-New York area had difficulty advancing because “they would take a man’s job.” My mother told me of one of her employment experiences in the 1950s to advance in the aerospace industry; she related that she was told confidentially by her boss that she was well-qualified — but wasn’t a man. Her retort: “What if I wore pants to work?” She still didn’t get the job.
Fast forward to the mid-1960s when women and minorities were finally and lawfully encouraged to be hired due to affirmative action. As a woman, I was now considered a minority, and I benefited greatly. In the 1970s I was now college-educated, articulate and adventurous, and ready to find a job, and did in the insurance industry in Dallas. I worked for 10 years and every day, women and minorities (my friends/associates) all thanked affirmative action for “opening the door” — so qualified people previously underemployed or unemployed could be productive workers and contributors to their communities.
Can we conclude then that people’s experiences, as well as their gender and “perceived” race determine vastly different fates and vastly different opinions?
I wholeheartedly agree with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissenting opinion on Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College in June. She wrote, “Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”
Diane Teter
Edinburg
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