By Steve Gunn
EAGnews.org

HOUSTON – We wonder what Houston teachers union officials would say if they found out their members had been underpaid due to a clerical error since 2000.

You can almost hear them screaming about the need to reimburse the employees immediately.

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As it turns out, the opposite occurred. A payroll glitch in the Houston school district resulted in the overpayment of thousands of dollars to school employees for a number of years, according to a news report on abclocal.go.com.

Nobody was overpaid a great deal of money. The largest amount for any individual equaled about four weeks of compensation, the news report said. The district is asking the employees to repay the funds and offering several easy ways to do it.

They may surrender earned time off, have small deductions taken from their paychecks over a two-year period, or, if they prefer, make a one-time payment to the district. It sounds like a reasonable remedy for an unfortunate error.

But Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, doesn’t believe the employees should have to pay the money back.

“You don’t go back and tell an employee that you are going to pay us something from eight years ago,” Fallon told the website. “We’re going to suggest to our members, tell them no, make them sue you.”

Why should the school district have to sue employees to regain its money? While the overpayment was clearly the district’s fault, that doesn’t give the employees the right to keep the money, and more than a bank customer would have a right to keep that $100 bill accidently inserted into their envelope through a drive-up window.

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Mistakes happen. They do not give people a license for thievery.

One might expect the teachers union to care enough about the school district and its students to assist with the effort to recover the lost money. The Houston school district, like most others across the nation, is desperate for operating dollars. The lost money could be used to benefit children.

But we suppose it would be asking too much to expect the union to do the right thing. Union leaders say they care about public schools and children, but their actions consistently suggest that they only care about their dues-paying members.

Mark this episode down as further evidence that teachers unions are nothing more than powerful parasites, designed to suck as much tax money as they can from struggling school districts.