ALFRED – I am writing with my concern about Gov. LePage’s plan to tamper with my Maine retirement and reduce my already-stretched paycheck.

I am 42 with 15 years of credit teaching here in southern Maine. Until I most recently remarried, I was a single mom for five years supporting two children on my modest teaching salary.

The governor is proposing that teachers pay a 2 percent payroll tax to balance the books and provide tax breaks.

As the Maine Education Association’s newsletter put it this month, “Currently, teachers pay a 7.65 percent contribution to MePERS (the Maine Public Employee Retirement System) and 1.45 percent for Medicare for a total of 9.1 percent. This tax hike increases the total employee contribution to 11.1 percent. By way of comparison, private employees pay only 7.65 percent for both Social Security and Medicare.”

This school year alone my pay has gone down due to increased health insurance costs and, in our district, my salary is frozen due to contract negotiations. The “Making Work Pay” credit is now gone from my pay as of January and I make $14 less every two weeks, meaning $364 less a year.

I can’t imagine another 2 percent payroll tax gone from my gross pay! That would be another $31 or so gone from my pay every two weeks, or $820 a year. These two factors alone may mean living on almost $1,200 less next year after 15 years of service.

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Not to mention, I buy supplies for my classroom, take classes to maintain my certification, and must pay for books and fees (although my district fortunately does reimburse tuition costs for two graduate classes).

Gov. LePage’s proposal to cap the cost-of-living increase at 2 percent instead of 4 percent adds further insult to injury for retired MePERS workers, who already are shortchanged by the reduction of Social Security benefits because it is seen as a “windfall.”

MEA retirees are not eligible to collect the full Social Security benefits they have worked for in our state, unlike other states.

Over the course of my career I held second jobs to make ends meet and made required contributions to Social Security.

When I consider my retirement I am disheartened to think I won’t receive a portion of money I had to involuntarily pay out for Social Security.

Further, I will have contributed a higher percentage out of my teaching pay than my peers who were private-sector employees did out of their pay.

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Raising the retirement age to 65 won’t save MePERS any money; it will only increase the retirement cost and benefit for each individual in the long run.

In my relatively short career in teaching, I have already seen the retirement age increased from 60 to 62 for MePERS workers. Increasing the age of retirement for teachers may do a disservice in the long run to the education system we are trying to improve.

Philosophically speaking, career educators will have to stay for 40 or more years to get their full Maine benefit, not making way for new blood with new ideas and content knowledge.

Fiscally speaking, the cost of paying a teacher will increase with every year of service.

This will ultimately increase the payout for an educator’s eventual retirement since the formula is based on the three highest years of salary; generally these are the last years of service.

This call for sacrifice comes on the heels of hearing that toll takers on our Maine Turnpike make more money than most teachers!

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I teach because I love it. I want to make a difference in future generations that will run our state and our country. Don’t make our already-stretched current teachers pay to help replace our retirement that was raided by former Gov. John McKernan and former Maine legislators when they had to make other budget ends meet in years past.

Please respect our retired teachers already living on fixed incomes who haven’t received a COLA in two years, with perhaps no hope in sight until 2014 if this budget proposal passes.

This budget proposal does not protect teachers’ futures and hurts us in the present. Our schools and their employees have made plenty of sacrifices, doing more with less in the past few years due to eroding education budgets.

It’s not our fault our retirement system has a shortfall due to others’ shortsightedness, and we shouldn’t have to pay more to make up for it.

 

– Special to the Press Herald

 


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