District Contracts

The Valhalla Teachers' Contract

The Co Curriculas -  Did you know we had an Orchestra Leader?  $1,900 stipend.  Intramurals $2,658 (with 80% of the kids playing interscholastic sports who is playing intramural sports?)  Jewelry Club $2,336 Bowling Club, not to be confused with the Bowling Teams or Intramural Bowling, we pay someone another $2,336 for as a Bowling Club coordinator.  The Kensico Club, incase you are not in one of the 54 clubs, another $2,336.  The Drum Club,  The Oddessy of the Mind, the Middle School Debate Team, The Cooking Club and on and on.  A cash cow.  Clubs funded in year one by the WestHelp Partnership and every other year by the taxpayer.   Clubs and teams are added every year.

The Coaches 46 coaching positions paying as high as $8,308 per season.  Three seasons a year.  A teacher, wholly unqualified, could easily average $15,000 as a coach or assistant in three season a year.  TimeKeepers and Shot Clock officials, at $120 per game. 

Longevity, a 30 year teacher will received over $5,000 for being......, you guessed it a 30 year teacher.  There are bonuses for coming to work, the less days you miss the more you are paid.  Folks these people only work 10 months a year, only 183 days. 

Mentoring, being nice to first year fellow union member teachers, over $1,200 a year.  Valhalla mentors all new teachers whether they are veteran teachers or just out of school.  NYS does not require mentoring for veteran hires.  The school district's attorney advised that Valhalla should not mentor veteran teachers and that this would be a significant cost savings.  But Valhalla went right ahead and put full mentoring into the contract.  Mentoring, like all these other stipended perks are nothing more than gifts to the teachers. 

Coordinating this hug fest will pay Teacher coordinators $2,675 a year.    Home tutoring @ $44.00 hour. 

Valhalla Teachers are paid to show up (more if they come to work everyday), to be civil to each other, to cover for fellow teachers, to attend children's games, to tutor kids after school (these can be the same kids that do not learn during the same teacher's class), to coordinate ersatz clubs Board Games, Backgammon, Jewelry, Drums.... To coach whether they know anything about the game or not and if they last long enough for simply lasting long enough. 

The Superintendent's Contract

The Business Manager

Here we have the business manager's contracts from 1997 through 2010.  See what was a simple, fair one page, three year program in 1997 turned into a five year cash cow paying for:

• Health clubs-  paragraph #4 
• Life insurance of two times annual salary, no limit! See paragraph 5
• A car allowance of $400 a month! see paragraph 10
• Double retirement annuity payments totalling $38,714 a year! see paragraphs #2 and #13.   
• Payment of 1/3 of unused sick days on retirement! paragraph 9
• A poison pill all but ensuring payment through the contract term even if the position is eliminated in a merger.   paragraphs #11 and #12

The Building Administrators

Two of these administrators are gone, but they have been replaced by three others.  Salary increases of 8% 7% and 8% compound to a 24% increase over 3 years.  Is anyone representing the taxpayers in this collective bargaining contract?  We know that in the base year of this contract board members included the spouse of a teacher, a spouse of a teacher aide and teacher's union member. 

In addition, principals are paid stipends $5,000 for evening administration.  That means that their extremely high full time pay is further inflated when they actually have to do full time work.  No full time salaried manager in the business world gets extra pay for staying after hours. 

And, these principals can get a 6% bonus!  Based on what?  Can you measure performance at the kindergarten level that warrants $8,750 bonus?  In the last year of the high school principal's tenure he would be eligible for almost $11,000 bonus! 

One Administrator, the principal at the Kensico School, is paid an additional $50,000 a year by the district to administer the WestHelp Partnership.  Can you imagine your employer giving you a part time job that you can do at the same time you do your full time job and get paid for both?  And the School District did not even hire him for the part time position, he was hired by "The WestHelp Partnership" which apparently controls hiring of school district positions.

Look carefully at each contract.  They are all inter-related.  Perks in one eventually accrue to the other.  The other long running game is the claim that "we are only trying to bring our administrators up to the area average" As the bottom becomes the average, the average goes higher and higher.  It is an never ending upward spiral.

Superintendent of Building and Grounds

With increases of averaging 8% over three years our head custodian's salary jumped from $88,675 in 2003-2004 to $109,646 this year.