Why Changes to ERB are so Upsetting to Educators and Educational Staff

It was pointed out in the Albuquerque Journal today that not everyone has a retirement fund like the one educators and educational staff have in this state. This is true but what they forgot to say was that this is in return for a lower pay while working in the field. We all know that people working in the field of education take a pay cut from the very beginning and don’t earn the same salary or wages for their degrees that some would in the industry they are trained in.

I for one would be making a lot more money working as an accountant but instead I help train new accountants because our state very much needs honest hardworking people in that field of study. So why dose State Senator John A. Smith and State Senator Tim Jennings so much care for these changes in educational retirement funding? Maybe because they have no vested interest in providing our state with well educated employees and they have no vested interest in the public education system in this state. Perhaps they want our state to be 50th in the nation when it comes to education.

They won’t tell voters that this decision which they so whole heartily support is encouraging the most experienced instructors in our educational system to retire now so as not to loss out on their retirement benefits. After all would you want to be forced to retire at a later age knowing that you will not live long enough to collect any of the money you were forced to put into a retire fund? Educational employees don’t get to say no when it come to paying into their retirement fund even if it forces them to not be able to pay daily bills. How many New Mexicans earning far more each year decide not to have a retirement fund simply because they feel they cannot afford it?

Tell an educational employee who is a single mother making $22,000 a year that she will have to pay more into her retirement fund when she is having problems keeping a working car and putting food on the table for her own child. Tell her that some rich old white fat man in Santa Fe thinks that she is earning too much when she is already facing cuts to her pay from the budget and now even though there is not a current threat to the fund she will be forced to pay more to a retirement fund which is spending the money on outrages uncontrolled lawyer feeds for people who are being investigated for wrong doing. For double dippers who have already retired and are still allowed to work while not paying into the fund. For school presidents who make hundred of thousands of dollars each year just to tell their employees that they might not have a job in the near future.

How many educational employees who are too young to retire will be forced to move back into the industry to make ends met taking those jobs from less educated, less experience individuals while failing to properly educate our children for the future? Clearly fat old white men in Santa Fe don’t care about our state or our children but only about who buys their drinks at the country club and the local bars. Maybe the time is coming soon to replace those individuals in Santa Fe with people who care about our children and our states working poor.