All of my “median income” searches for Broward is only about $39k not the 70k you present. The average income for a family of 4 is closer to $45k. Family of course, means mom and pop working.

I’ve done the research. You can fantasize teachers at 70k all you want but it’s just not on the reality curve.

Most professionals start their careers at about 24 or 25k and all of your protests will not change that fact. Most pros top out at $55k. Teachers are well above that, and everything else is a wishful thinking fantasy.

The crime is not the bottom to top scale, but the step raises. Get used to it. No other Teacher unit treats their rank and file as shabbily as BTU. 3% raises need to be 3%, not $25 with the remainder given to teachers at step 20.

My “one term” was all about cutting waste and saving money. I ran the leanest budgets of any School Board member either then or since.

I knew what the waste was and cut as much of it as I could from BELOW THE RADAR. I didn’t see the need to create headlines unless they were warranted. The headlines over the twisted purchase of the crap land in Southwest Ranches were purely generated by yours truly.

My “one term” was simply because I generated resentment from the community for firing the “greatest Superintendent Broward ever had.”

But then again, I had absolutely nothing to lose. I had already been warned by my doctors (yes plural) not to run for re-election back in July of 2006. But run I did, anyway.

The primary election in September (which I won) took everything out of me. The remainder of the campaign was a disaster. I could no longer walk, I needed to rest way too often. I had absolutely nothing to lose in firing Frank Till.

And doing so got rid of a great deal of waste. Not all, admittedly, but enough to make a difference.

I’ll take care of the teacher payroll war from retirement.

Your mission, Mr. Phelps, should you decide to accept it, is to engineer the defeat of every board member that dropped their drawers every time Till said “boo.”

And you can bet your bottom dollar that not one of the five who voted to fire Till will be targets.

The entire top level must go.

The rank and file must find a leader who will guide them and mount a revolt that will either remove Santeramo and his crowd, or replace BTU itself.

I’m sure CTA or other units would love to talk to them.

With respect, there’s a reason you were only a one termer at the school board. You don’t see the thing for what it is and what it needs to become. Median income for a family in Broward is a little less than $70K. That’s what teachers need to average in order to be paid right in the middle. For that, they go to college, often to graduate school, and give to our children the most precious thing that they can get in their lifetimes — an education. The school board never fails to say that they don’t have enough money. But the fact is they waste money like no other entity could imagine doing. The waste and abuse in that organization is way out of porportion. Like Bob Norman likes to say, that organization needs an emema and a good hot shower afterward. Tear the thing down and build it back up I say with the right priorities. There will be more than enough to pay teachers, and to get them to stay after class like they used to years ago and tutor, and all kinds of things that teaching as a profession has lost. Teaching is first and foremost a public service, not a civil service.

Till tried to set up the School Board by insisting the Board put a $3/4 Billion tax hike on the ballot in 2006. If it failed (which it would, he would have blamed the Board.)

I stopped it. (My vote was the defeating vote.)

Then I stopped Till. Yes, me.

I was the fifth vote to fire him. Four other votes, but I get the blame because I was the deciding vote. So be it.

But Till is not the subject here. BTU is. DO NOT BLAME THE LEGISLATURE. well, not completely, anyway.

Take a look at the real culprit at http://www.martyrubinstein.com