By Victor Skinner
EAGnews.org

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Parents of students in Ann Arbor schools will pay more this school year, while teachers will be paid more.

The district imposed a $100 fee for students who want to take a seventh class this school year, and drastically increased the fee for students to play a sport from $150 to $250, Michigan Capitol Confidential reports.

MORE NEWS: From Classroom to Consulate Chef: Culinary Student Lands Dream Job at U.S. Embassy in Paris

Meanwhile, teachers will receive an automatic salary increase of about 2.8 percent, although the media and union want the public to believe teachers are sacrificing with a 3 percent reduction.

“Numerous media reports mentioned that ‘all teachers’ in Ann Arbor Public Schools would take a 3 percent salary reduction for 2013-14. However, that reduction applied to the salary schedule and not teachers’ salaries. Teachers were allowed to still move up a step on the salary schedule, meaning many still received a raise because the salary increase for moving up a step was larger than the 3 percent reduction,” Michigan Capitol Confidential reports.

“For example, a sixth-year teacher with a master’s degree had a salary of $61,873 in 2012-13. That sixth-year salary spot on the scale was reduced to $60,017 for 2013-14. However, that teacher moves up to the seventh-year slot in the salary schedule and would make $63,589 in 2013-14, a 2.8 percent increase from the original salary level.”

That means the 500-plus teachers in Ann Arbor schools with less than 10 years in the classroom (10 years is the top of the salary schedule) all received a 2.8 percent raise simply by returning to work this year. Michigan Capitol Confidential reports the district employed 546 teachers with 10 or fewer years in the classroom in 2011, and 629 teachers with 11 years or more.

In essence, school and union officials, along with the media, are misleading the public about how their tax dollars are spent. They use technicalities about what constitutes a “raise” versus a “step increase” to confuse the public, and shift more of the burden onto parents to close the district’s $8.7 million deficit for next year.

The reality is that by eliminating the automatic step raises, and by cutting other union goodies in the teacher contract, the district could make up much more than they’ll get back from taxing students for an extra class or for playing sports.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

District officials justified their money management by saying they worked really hard to come to “a fair agreement” with the teachers union, and the teachers union’s “concessions” allowed district officials to secure savings from its other eight unions.

“Every employee is contributing to make up the ongoing deficit that plagues not only (Ann Arbor Public Schools) but every public school district in the state due to the inadequate funding policies of public education in Michigan,” district spokeswoman Liz Margolis wrote to Michigan Capitol Confidential in an email.

The American Civil Liberties Union issued a letter to the district earlier this month calling the fees for seventh-hour classes “misguided and illegal.”

“Our system of free education is founded on the idea that all children should have access to knowledge though teachers, classrooms, books and rigorous and varied curricula. The proposal of charging for seventh period flies in the face of this American tradition,” Kary Moss, executive director of ACLU of Michigan, wrote to board members, according to AnnArbor.com.

The district’s current funding priorities may be “a fair agreement” for teachers, but what about students and their families? What about students who can’t afford an extra class, or to play a sport?

Perhaps they’ll just have to sit on the sidelines.

We believe it’s disingenuous for Ann Arbor school officials to point their fingers at Lansing lawmakers when they approve automatic raises for teachers without regard to performance or the impact on their already stretched budget.

Parents would be wise to protest the district’s unreasonable fees and point out the hypocrisy, and to enlist the help of the American Civil Liberties Union to pressure school officials to reconsider their priorities.