Rob Robertson: The teacher tax

Being educators, my wife and I have paid $20,000 in “taxes” due to salary freezes. My wife will be “taxed” another $15,000 over the next half-decade due to the new salary scale without longevity pay as compared with the older scale with longevity pay.

Lawmakers continue to give higher raises to younger teachers but treat veterans like dirt. Over time, my wife and I will lose another $75,000 in pension funds due to the salary sabotages.

College tuitions are due, with us having no money to pay. Since we’ve contributed so much “tax” money through lost salary, would the lawmakers apply some of this loss to the tuitions? Colleges do not accept Teacher of the Year awards as exchange in currency, nor does the grocery store.

Funding our tuitions would be fair since we’ve dedicated our lives at low pay educating the state’s children. They could perhaps start a pool of contributions from their own salaries since they regularly voted themselves raises and increased their own pensions during our salary freezes.

This heavy “Permit to Teach North Carolina’s Children” tax has been detrimental to our state’s educators. Is this perhaps why we now have a significant teacher shortage?

This story was originally published July 6, 2015 at 6:06 PM with the headline "Rob Robertson: The teacher tax."