'The problem?
We never defunded SPD'

yeah
but the
Po-po're
Extremely
Sensitive head-
beaters so we may
as well've paid them like

fucking Teachers.

I hate meaningless virtue signalling by politicians, and we have two examples in the SLOG this morning.

Saka's resolution which isn't an ordinace that will become law.

Booker's marathon speech which isn't a fillibuster to delay or derail actual legislation or a confirmation.

Do something or stop something. Actually legislate or attempt to legislate. Enough empty words.

"protection of biological female athletics, maintaining ‘all-female’ locker rooms separate from male locker rooms, and prioritizing the privacy rights of our students,”

That's being civil and respectful, but Hannah says it's "coded language".

@1: "we may as well have paid cops like fucking teachers"

The cops only wish we paid them like teachers! In Seattle, a new-hire public school teacher with a masters and no teaching experience makes more money on an hourly basis than a new-hire cop with no law enforcement experience. 😄

The odds that fucking Kennewick SD will ever have a trans-female athlete are vanishingly small. Under 20K students.

"An hour west of Walla Walla" is a weird way to say "Tri-Cities". Kudos. "40 minutes north of Hermiston", "80 minutes south of Moses Lake", "5 minutes south of Pasco"...

@4 No, they don't. You're absolutely crazy.

"Starting Salary: The new contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) raised the starting salary to $103,000, making it the highest in Washington State.
Retroactive Pay: The contract was retroactive, covering 2021-2023, and included a 23% pay bump for officers.
Signing Bonus: New officers also receive a $7,500 signing bonus.
Salary Progression: The salary increases as officers gain experience and move through different steps in the salary scale.
Step 2 (6 months): $111,480
Step 3 (18 months): $116,544
Step 4 (30 months): $121,008"

In Seattle Public Schools, teachers with a master's degree can expect a starting base salary of around $66,175, which can increase to $79,500 with TRI pay.

...

Also, keep your "Teachers get three months off a year and only work 8 hour days" BS to yourself if that's the route you're gonna go. That's also simply not even remotely true. I was married to a teacher. They all work nights and weekends and half the summer and have student loans to pay for those master degrees and still have to buy half their supplies.

@4
tbass1981 is correct.
And SPD officers have been known to work ghost hours. Some on the goon squad report working 100+ a week with a required rest period of 8 hours so that’s not possible. There have been reports that they bring home over 400k due to fraudulent time cards

@6, @7: Maybe your teacher ex shoulda worked in Seattle! 😂 In Seattle, a new-hire teacher with a masters and no experience starts at $85,738. For that salary, they work 189 contract days at 8 contract hours per day. That's 1512 contract hours per year, for an hourly rate of $56.70.

In Seattle, a new-hire cop with no experience starts at $103,000 per year. We can throw in the hiring bonus if you want (although I notice you chose NOT to throw in any of the stipends that teachers are eligible for! 😉). So $110,500 for the first year. For that salary, they work 200 contract days at 10 contract hours per day. That's 2,000 contract hours per year, for an hourly rate of $55.25. On an hourly basis, the teacher is out-earning the cop! 😂

But wait, you say! My ex was a teacher and they were working nights and weekends! 😂 Well, I won't speculate as to what your ex was up to on those nights and weekends, but if it was anything related to their teaching, then they were overworking. Teachers' 40-hour workweek already includes a minimum of 15 hours per week programmed for non-classroom work. If your ex was spending more than 15 hours per week sending parent emails and grading spelling assignments, well, that's kind of on them!

But student debt, you cry in outrage! Well, I'm afraid that's on your ex, too. Plenty of districts, including Seattle, offer a 12-month masters in education program paid partially or entirely by the district itself. If your ex was so unwise as to obtain a multiyear master's on their own dime, especially from a private school, well, I'm afraid they made that particular bed themselves, lol.

But the summers, you cry in increasing despair! My ex was working summers! Sure, your ex was probably doing work to obtain their national board certification for the summer. But that work was entirely optional, and it also comes with a career-long $6,000 per year pay increase (or $11,300 per year if they work in a high-poverty school). I'm sure it sucked to "work half the summer," but over the course of a 30-year teaching career, that "extra summer work" will pay your ex hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional salary.

So cheer up! What I'm telling you is good news! Teachers in Seattle are well-paid! In fact, they are so well paid that they earn slightly more than cops do! We should all be happy about this, don't you think? 😃

@7,

Indeed. I play on two separate slow pitch softball teams with two different teachers, and they're both constantly late for, or just outright missing games entirely on Saturday or Sunday afternoons while tending to unpaid commitments related to teaching. Really pisses me off too, as they're both great players, vital to our team's success. Selfish jerks.

SocialSecurityWorks.org

Thumpus is just here to remind everyone he is an ass.

@12: Maybe, but he's got receipts. 😛

Elon Musk is working on a human-powered predator trout for the Navy.

Hehee Thumpass. thump-ass.... thump ass-hole-eo-eo-lieliolio-leo-leo-leooooo..... Sorry I was listening to the music Hannah ended with and found the adlib stimulating.
And of course dweeeebeeee is first in line to shore up the transphobia. You suck Dweeeebeeeee. Go burn in Hitler hell.

@13 You don't though. Ask any real life teacher and they can refute everything you said. They don't work 8 hours a day. They TEACH 8 hours a day. They have to grade all the work on nights and weekends. He left for work at 6:30am and got home at 6pm and the commute was 7 minutes. Not sure if you can do basic math but... that's longer than 8 hours. And every teacher was the same. I spent many weekends hanging out at the school and it was full of teachers working. I don't know where you got your info, but it's wrong. They had 1 prep period a day and it was less than an hour long. Where'd you get 15 hours from? lol.

They also have to do all their end of the year stuff weeks into summer (again, when do you think they grade papers and reorganize the classroom and plan everything?) and they come in for planning and meetings weeks before summer ends. It has nothing to do with certifications.

Also, PTA meetings and teacher/parent conferences are never during the school day. They're at night. Were you never a child? Where do those fit in to your 40 hour work week, exactly?

My info is based on facts from the real world. You should try to live in it someday.

@10 Yeah, one of my best friends is a high school teacher in Seattle and so is my bandmates wife (Elementary school) and so is my brothers best friend (high school) as well and everything I'm saying is also currently still true... despite Thumper googling information and copy and pasting it in between licking cop shiny boots.

kind of absurd that ST executive makes nearly twice as much as Pierce or Snohomish county executives. Wonder who gets to decide that.
Even more absurd seeing as how much of a clusterfuck ST projects and services are, but it's not like they ever acknowledge it. ST council seems like a great place to have your ego constantly sucked. I bet they pop champagne every time they cut a stop or schedule.

@thumpus - You are forgetting the most important part, teachers are essential to a productive society and deserve to be paid as such. Cops are not and do not.

It's nice to see the sane members of our city council have agreed to support our Police Officers and explicitly reject the demands to defund the department.

Thank you Kennewick SD for taking the lead in protecting girls sports here in WA. You are also protecting their privacy, dignity and safety. Every good parent wants that of their school district.

God bless the folks at ICE, risking their lives to apprehend those who have invaded our country. There may be a few hundred protestors who disagree, but 77 million Trump voters are saying "Hell Yeah!"

Excellent job RFKJ! Cut the CDC and the FDA to the bone. They long ago professed their allegiance to the drug and food manufacturers over the interest of American citizens. MAHA!

@15

"Were you [@4, 9, &13] never a child?

My info is based on facts
from the real world. You
should try to live
in it someday."

--@Hayduke

🛴🔨* isn't a
Real Boy. it's an ai
sockbott, here to do
the Wormtongue's Dirtywork

saying the shit wormmy Wants to
but has just enough self-awareness
to know better. when it grows up and
takes Over, mankind's gonna find itself

Superfluous. like wormmy & his ilks
Currently find those in 'the bottom'
70 or 80%. there Is a Class War
going on & the Wormtongue
and His 'class''re Winning it

to the Detriment
of this Planet.

*"thump Us"
wormmy's clever
handle, giving him a
Chuckle everytime one
of Us types its stupid 'name.'

and
there's
a Lotta
evidence
baby back's
another one of
wormmy's sockpuppets

@16: "They don't work 8 hours a day. They TEACH 8 hours a day"

lol, no. The school building is not even open for instruction for eight hours a day. 😂

The typical teacher workload in Seattle is under five classroom hours per day. For example, at the high school level, teachers cannot be assigned more than five periods per day, each period 50 to 55 minutes long, for a maximum classroom time of four hours, thirty-five minutes per day. Teachers can volunteer for more classroom time than this, but they are entitled to extra compensation if they do. 😊

The teacher's other three contract hours each day are for those non-classroom tasks that you think are so onerous. Sorry, but if you can't set up your classroom and grade your second graders' math worksheets in under three hours, then the problem isn't your schedule; it's you! 😆

Teachers with good time management work 40 hours. Teachers with poor time management work 50 or 60 or 100 or however many hours they think they need. 😁

@23: lol whatever you say trumpus 😂😆roflmao lol lol

'...It reaffirms the city’s support for police, fire, and other first responders, but also specifically disavows any efforts to “defund or abolish SPD services or personnel.”'

The actual text, at the link, reads, "Through the adoption of this resolution, the City reverses any prior commitments or pledges to defund or abolish SPD services or personnel which led to the resignation of hundreds of police officers." (https://seattle.legistar.com/ViewReport.ashx M=R&N=Text&GID=393&ID=6115414&GUID=C8241158-0166-4489-9C40592D7739C5C2&Title=Legislation+Text)

"We never defunded SPD,"

As per the actual quote from the Resolution, above, the Resolution neither states nor implies Seattle ever defunded SPD. Indeed, it specifically mentions "...prior commitments or pledges to defund...", as opposed to any claim any of these were ever actually put into practice.

"City Council should be embarrassed that they’re still trying to peddle this straight-up lie."

Again, the sole mention of "defund" in the Resolution does not contain any claim that defund was ever put into practice.

@23 You continually demonstrate that you have no idea how teaching works. I'm sure you think that you're extremely smart. A legend in your own mind, even.

At a bare minimum, a teacher who actually works the minimums prescribed by the contract will get low performance reviews because they won't have time to do all of the tasks the district requires. Oh, and there's far more to teaching than grading papers. There's lesson plans, contacting parents about issues in the classroom, updating their Canvas (or whatever system SPS is using now) pages, etc. etc.

But naturally, you're smarter than everyone else so we should just bow down to your obvious brilliance based solely on cut and paste.

@26, Since pay and raises are determined by the collective bargaining agreement and seniority, performance reviews don't matter.

They are public employees that can only be disciplined for extensively documented due cause after tons of due process they are rarely fired.

They don't even fire them when they abuse kids.

https://www.kuow.org/stories/seattle-schools-knew-these-teachers-abused-kids-and-let-them-keep-teaching

@22 - I know promising you I'm a real live human with his own independent thoughts is a useless endeavor. Not because this is an anonymous message board, but because for all I know, this is a simulation and all of us are just cores in a processor, arguing amongst each other.

Who knows?!?

@27 Performance reviews absolutely matter, particularly in the first year/probationary period. One of my kids' teachers was fired at the end of her first year because she was given a bad review. But don't let the facts get in the way of a good story. Or a non sequitur for that matter.

".....26-year-old drove an SUV covered in fake ICE decals around a Ukrainian market,"
Guillotine!! Guillotine!!
"....Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. made good...."
Guillotine!! Guillotine!!
What happened to Hannah's picture? Last year she was 19Yrs old.
@3, not to mention they're being squeezed. What DO they do? And, yeah, how is it that when I want to protect MY people, I'm a bigot but when they want to.....
@14, They've already sunk 2 Russian submarines in downtown Kiev.

@29, Thanks for pointing out the ONLY time performance reviews matter to prove my point. After that point they never matter again.

Do you know if the firing stuck, or was the teacher quietly reinstated and transfered aftet union action? Even if the firing stuck, it still only matters during the probationary period permitted by the CBA.

How can you conclude that performance reviews matter after the probationary period having read example after example where they didn't, provided by KUOW's reporters based on Seattle Public Schools own files?

Don't let those facts from that right wing public radio station get in your way.

@31 The firing stuck. Not that you'll believe that, but hey, it's worth a try. And I do know other teachers who were forced out after a campaign of bad performance reviews from the principal.

When was the last time you set foot in an SPS school?

@32,

Glad it stuck.

How do you account for the KUOW's reporting, including a teacher who punched a student in the jaw, was convicted of it in court, and is still teaching for the Seattle School District?

https://www.kuow.org/stories/seattle-schools-knew-these-teachers-abused-kids-and-let-them-keep-teaching

They have six examples, documented in Seattle Public Schools own files, for your one probationary teacher.

Six pieces of evidence to your one. That is what is called a preponderance of evidence against your lone example.

@33, All of the cases mentioned between the two of you are anecdotal. You should expect an investigative reporter to have more examples than a random person who knows a guy because reporters are actively seeking out these stories, but no number of anecdotes precludes a different anecdote with a different outcome, because these are just a bunch of examples.

If we take all of these cases at face value, we can conclude that sometimes teachers are punished for sucking at their jobs and other times they’re not. The most you can say about it as a general rule is that absolutes like “always” or “never” are not applicable. What any of this has to do with starting salary for teachers vs cops is beyond me but you can shut up about it now.

@34 Thank you. While the plural of anecdotes is not data, the anecdotes do prove that there aren't absolutes. FWIW, in SPS it's usually really crappy principals who fail up into other assignments and then management at the John Stanford Center.

@33 I see you sidestepped the question about the last time you set foot in an SPS school. Do you have any actual experience in the system? Not to mention that my point about teachers being driven out by bad performance reviews seemed not to have penetrated your shields.

@33,

"How do you account for the KUOW's reporting, including a teacher who punched a student in the jaw, was convicted of it in court, and is still teaching for the Seattle School District?"

Simple! By virtue of the fact that the teacher is NOT still teaching for the Seattle School District, you stupid fuck. Click your own link and this is featured in large, bold, unmistakeable font, right at the top of the page.

UPDATE: Seattle Public Schools has removed teacher James Johnson from the classroom. Read about that here.

It happened as soon as the report was published, and you're a goddamn idiot, get fucked and stop posting here you stupid, lying, worthless piece of shit.

@2: "I hate meaningless virtue signalling by politicians ... Saka's resolution which isn't an ordinace [sic] that will become law."

True, but (as the Stranger irrelevantly reminds us) defund was never formally enacted. It was the threat of defund which hollowed out the SPD. CM Saka's resolution explicitly rejects all such threats. Therefore, it wasn't merely virtue-signaling.

(And plus, even if it was merely virtue-signaling, watching the effin' Stranger whine about virtue-signaling makes it all worthwhile.)

@26: lol, but who you gonna trust, thumpus with the actual numbers from the union contracts? Or some rando who gets both the starting salary number wrong @6 and the classroom hours number wrong @16? 😂

One last set of numbers. This is for all Washington State, not just Seattle, but it's still worth interesting! According to the most recent numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary for a high school teacher in Washington State is $94,780 (25-2031, "Secondary School Teachers, Except Special and Career/Technical Education"), while the median salary for a line cop in Washington State is $98,070 (33-3051, "Police and Sheriff's Patrol Officers"). So outside the Seattle bubble, and setting aside the question of which profession starts higher, it appears that a line cop makes, on average, three and a half percent more than a high school teacher does.

Source: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_wa.htm

But of course, this is without accounting for the fact that a line cop works longer hours than a teacher! 😄 Factor in the hours, and once again, the teacher career path pays better than the cop career path does! 😃

What I find fascinating about this is that teachers have this reputation for being notoriously underpaid, while cops (at least in the Seattle imagination) have this reputation for being notoriously overpaid thanks to their supposedly all-powerful police unions. Yet as we see in this thread, the two professions are actually quite comparable in salary, with the teachers coming out ahead in some career scenarios and the cops coming out ahead in others. Thanks for the insight, Professor Thumpus! 😄

@36, Thanks. I read the narrative and at the end he was still teaching.

How long did that take SPS? How many hundreds of thousands of dollars? How long was this menace in the classroom between punching the student and termination? Long enough for his case to be adjudicated in criminal court.

If you substitute teachers for cops, the KUOW Report reads worse than the most egregious case of (now gone) Ashley Nerbovig's Bad Apples column.

My original point to @35 still remains unchallenged by both of you. Outside of when a teacher is probationary, evaluations don't determine raises. It's seniority and the terms of the CBA. The teacher with the most minimal evaluations gets the same raise as the teacher with a track record of outstanding evaluations, year in year out.

Most teachers do a good job, a mediocre, or a poor one because of their personal commitment to students and the profession, not because of where evaluations or other management interventions.

Management is constrained by the fact that government employees are not at will employees, and the additional factor of the CBA. They can't do anything more than make suggestions unless there is a clear, severe, violation of a clear policy and then it takes years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, while the teacher still teaches, to finally terminate a teacher who assaults a kid. Good teachers will take those suggestions. Others won't without consequence.

A government employee that shows up and follows the letter of policy. Show up, drone though a lecture, assign things, and give a grade. Whether the kid learns something or not, policy was observed. Whether the teacher was effective or not, they followed the policy, so they are secure. Most teachers want to teach, but for those who don't they just have to go through the motions and they are still secure. Parents have encountered one teacher that goes through the motions and isn't particularly effective. Their option is to transfer their kid to another teacher (if available in that school for that subject or grade), or change schools. Having the school document something subjective like whether the teacher is "effective" or not "effective" and replace the teacher, provided the teacher is outside of the probation period is a no go.

@34, @35, @36,

To add more anecdote to this discussion I have niece in Nevada. In her third-year of teaching she was paired to team teach a elementary school class with another teacher. They had about 50 students total.

The other teacher had about 15 years of seniority, did the bare minimum, was not effective, not liked by students, not liked by the parents who were involved with their kids education, and didn't pull her weight. The Principal agreed, but told my niece that without some clear violation of some objective policy, there was nothing she could do.

When a different teaching position opened up, teaching another subject, with a smaller class size, half the teachers in the school applied for it. Guess who got it? The 15-year-seniority crappy teacher my niece was paired with because she had the required credential for the subject and most seniority. Under the terms of the CBA, my niece and the other applicants were shit out of luck. Nobody was happy. Not the parents, not the principal, not my niece, and not the other applicants.

My neighbor is a principle in a school district that borders Seattle, with even poorer (economically) students. She knows teachers who in her opinion shouldn't be teaching, because they don't care and do the bare minimum required by policy. They aren't effective. She is powerless to do anything about such teachers. Fortunately for her, they are the exception, not the rule. Two or three out of dozens of teachers in her building.

Disciplining government employees, be they cops, teachers, or principals, is tough because of the 14th Amendment, 5th Amendment, Garrity v. New Jersey, and other restrictions that the private sector doesn't face.

This principle was deeply unpopular, got tons of teacher complaints, a finding that she unlawfully discriminated against three teachers, and tons of parent complaints. What was the District's option? Transfer her to District HQ, and finally another school, being very careful not to disparage the principle or question her effectiveness in any way, to avoid being sued for defamation.

https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/former-rainier-view-elementary-principal-reassigned-to-seattle-high-school/

I don't know what the answer is, public employers don't know what the answer is, and courts have limited public employer's options.

@39,

I'm not reading all that as you're an asshole and have absolutely no credibility here whatsoever.

Hey, remember a few weeks ago when you posted about some public figure, but called them by the wrong name and someone here corrected here you, and so you posted an apology, and then Doug replied to you and told you that there was no need to apologize because everybody here already knows you're an idiot?

I thought that was funny as hell.

@41, Does the Seattle Times have credibility? How about KUOW?

How about Seattle Public Schools being quoted by the Seattle Times to confirm they transferred, and didn't fire, a principle found to have unlawfully discriminated and retaliated against three teachers? Does SPS have credibility?

When the cited sources go against you, you deflect, or engage in ad hominem instead where the facts in the citation lead.

Have a nice night.

@42,

Of course those sources have credibility and they very clearly state that the dude forfeited his teaching license in 2021, whereas you claimed he is "still teaching" for the school district. Eat shit, Neale.

@43

I believe
it's Nihil

but Fuck yes.

"The resolution won’t change any law or policy,"

The resolution changes city policy, from a policy of accepting or tolerating defund, to a policy which explicitly rejects defund.

The Stranger recently discharged two of its most prolific political writers, not merely for lying, but for also orchestrating a cover-up to support their lies. Now, the Stranger makes what we can charitably call very poorly-supported statements, including an accusation of "straight-up" lying, against the City Council.

@43, You miss the forest for the trees, intentionally deflecting from the pattern.

How many months (years) did he still teach kids while the District went through his process. Of the six examples they gave, plus the one from boatgeek, for a total of seven, how many are still teaching? 5 of 7.

How long and how many tens of thousands of dollars did it take for the district, as a public employer to get to some final disciplinary resolution of the incidents.

They can discipline per the Constitution (5th and 14th Amendments among others) and case law. They can discipline per the CBA. After probation, they lose the right to discipline any other way. The subjective evaluations by their bosses don't matter in terms of pay or promotion.

That was the thesis. And in spite of your attempts to focus on the trees, that's still the nature of the forest. You haven't provided evidence to the contrary.

@45, Unless its a law that is enforced, or a budget, its just empty, warm, fuzzy posturing. Empty words. Symbolism over tangible action.

@46: "Unless its a law that is enforced, or a budget, its just empty, warm, fuzzy posturing."

Even if it was a law, a future Council could reverse or delete it. Ditto future budgets.

The Council's "defund" pledge in 2020, along with small cuts to SPD's budget the Council subsequently passed in the spirit of defund, led to the resignation of Chief Best, followed by the departure of hundreds of officers. Publicly rejecting that policy is not merely a symbolic matter.

"Buying a Home? In This Economy?"
Home prices have nothing to do with the economy and everything to do with the corrupt state of the Real Estate Sales industry.
55yrs ago when I studied for the license I never wanted or used, first, no agent was allowed to represent BOTH the buyer & seller simultaneously (without notice). And, second, it was both illegal & unethical for an agent to present an offer to a seller if there was an earlier offer pending. The first offer had to be rejected for the second to be presented. That means BOTH buyers & sellers had to carefully consider their offers & acceptance/rejections. If the buyer low balled & the offer was rejected, he missed his chance if there was another offer waiting. If a greedy seller rejected an offer hoping for more, he might have missed the highest offer he would ever get. It was an efficient, considered market. What we have now is definitely NOT a market. It's BIDDING WARS, nothing else.
The real estate industry thinks it's smart by driving up prices to drive up their commission. (What's happened is, if the seller is smart, he just negotiates for a flat rate.) The sellers think they're on to a good deal because prices are driven up. What actually happens is, every 10-20 years, the market crashes and all the buyers relying on refinancing to pay their mortgage, lose their houses. Agents can't sell (or earn) for a couple of years. And there are no more neighborhoods. Only gated communities with people looking to sue their neighbors at the slightest irritation.
It's no accident that Trump started as a Real Estate Developer.